came from panning stream beds and surface soil in the resource areas around the headwaters of the Senegal and Gambia Rivers during the dry season, or, in some regions, nuggets were won by mining underground veins. The yields then circulated as a currency in units defined by weight. For measuring out units of gold dust currency, Juula merchants had adopted a special apparatus from the Muslim world via the trans-Saharan trade—a balance scale and a set of weights based on the Islamic ounce and pound. The mithqal, an Islamic unit of weight of about 4.25 grams, the standard weight of a dinar coin, thus became a shared currency value and a major vehicle that enabled and encouraged trade to take place between North and sub-Saharan African economies.14
The Cape Verdean Álvares de Almada recorded his own direct observations of Juula merchants buying gold in a town on the north bank of the upper Gambia River in the second half of the sixteenth century. Traveling overland in heavily guarded caravans, they carried their gold dust in small containers concealed in their clothing for safekeeping. Most of it was in the form of very fine flakes of metal, and Almada deemed it very high in quality, that is, it was not debased by the addition of brass filings or other impurities. He wrote admiringly of the Juulas’ reliability and expertise in trading matters, especially the care they took in the skillfully precise handling of their weights and scales. He described the apparatus and equipment in some detail, noting in particular the accuracy of the balance scale, its elegant construction, and the fine quality of its materials. The weights were made of brass cast in a minutely calibrated range of sizes and shapes, which each merchant stored in the drawers of his leather-bound writing case. Almada’s curiosity was piqued by the fact that when Juula traveled to the resource area, they acquired their gold mostly in exchange for copper bracelets, a transaction that from his perspective would not have been profitable to the suppliers of the gold since they acquired only a base metal in return. Making inquiries into the matter, he came to understand that the Juula were simply responding to the cultural values of peoples in the goldfields who preferred copper ornaments to their gold. No doubt sensing a profitable opportunity, he inquired yet further into exactly how much copper would yield how much gold but found he had reached the limit of what the Juula—surely sensing his avarice—were willing to disclose about their commercial operations.15 Secrecy was one of the ways people protected their trading networks, preferred markets, and most reliable suppliers.
Muslim merchants introduced another currency, cowry shells, from either the Near East or the Indian Ocean basin into West African networks via trans-Saharan trading routes at least as early as the eleventh century. Evidence of this traffic comes from travelers’ accounts collected and written down by al-Bakri, which mentioned cowry imports observed at that time in the vicinity of Gao. Other written sources from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries make additional references to cowries being carried across the Sahara along the western caravan route leading southward from Sijilmasa to Ghana. Archaeological remains of a portion of what was one such caravan offer material corroboration of these rather sparse and meager written sources. Whatever the reason for the demise of part of a caravan, whether it was attacked or wrecked by sandstorms and unstable dunes, several camels and their loads came to a halt en route, never reaching their destination. What survived of them is impressive. Along with approximately two thousand standard-sized rods of copper and copper alloy were several containers filled with cowry shells. The site, called Ma’den Ijafen, is believed to date to the twelfth century (see map 1.1).16
It is not known precisely when and where cowries first began to circulate south of the Sahara as a form of currency. The first mention of a cowry currency in the Arabic sources comes from al-Umari, who wrote in 1337/8 about the Mali Empire and what was remembered thirteen years after the pilgrimage to Mecca of its leader, Mansa Musa. Among his informants was one Ibn Amir Hajib, a governing official of Cairo, who had met and befriended Musa and claimed to have had many informative conversations with him. Hajib recounted to al-Umari some of what Mansa Musa had told him about Mali’s history and culture. Gold was apparently collected as tribute but exported, and the main currency circulating in Mali at that time was imported cowry shells. He added that merchants who were specialists in the business of supplying cowry imports profited handsomely from it.17 Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan traveler in West Africa from February 1352 to December 1353, provides a brief but very instructive eyewitness description of cowry currency in his written account of his travels. He noted that cowries were a currency there, specifying Mali and Gao in particular. Most precisely, he stated that in both places he had seen them changing hands at the same rate of 1,150 shells per gold dinar.18 Cowries amounted to small change and were especially useful for making minor transactions. As fixed and durable units, they could circulate by count in single- or multiple-shell units or, if necessary, in larger quantities by weight. Creating standard gold-cowry conversion rates thus provided greater flexibility and social reach to West African commerce by enabling a Muslim gold-weight system to operate in regular and reliable contact with shell-counting systems of polytheistic and rural peoples.19
A growing trade in cotton textiles set off stunning cultural and economic changes in West Africa, first by way of the high prestige and popularity of imported cotton clothing, especially among Muslims, and then with widespread production of it locally. Cotton had been known and probably also produced and woven in the Nile valley in northeastern Africa very early on between the third century BCE and fourth century CE, but it is unclear whether cotton and spinning, weaving, and sewing technologies traveled into other parts of sub-Saharan Africa before the Muslim era in the later first millennium.20 Cotton was a favored fiber for clothing in the Muslim world, and wearing high-quality cotton garments was a sign of elegance and modest good taste. Muslims promoted these values, thereby generating a “cotton culture” that extended beyond Islamic circles and over much of West Africa. Places in West Africa where cotton textile production became well-established—cultivating cotton fiber, spinning cotton yarn, weaving cotton cloth, and tailoring cotton garments—also became producers of cotton currencies that circulated widely.
Cotton technology spread into new areas of West Africa especially during the dry period of ca. 1100 to ca. 1500. Linguistic evidence in the form of words borrowed from Saharan Arabic for key aspects of this cotton culture demonstrates that the dissemination of cotton south of the Sahara owed much to these (presumably) Muslim merchants and their networks. Two separate groups of speakers of the language passed cotton goods and also the knowledge of cotton technology on to peoples living along the desert’s southern shore and lent them also their word for cotton fiber, kútan and gótun, dialectal variants of the Arabic qutn. The general geographical locations of these two groups of Arabic speakers and the geographical locations of sub-Saharan speech communities who borrowed these Arabic words for cotton both match well with the known geographical locations of the main western and central trans-Saharan trade routes. A very general time frame for when this transfer of knowledge could have occurred can be estimated based on the growing prominence of Muslims in the towns, cities, and courts of tropical West Africa early in the second millennium. Hence these events could have been set in motion in the tenth or eleventh century. Convincing evidence in support of this time frame comes from archaeology. Material remains in the form of spinning tools and locally made cotton textiles and tailored garments together corroborate the linguistic evidence by dating from a broad period spanning the tenth to seventeenth centuries.21 A superb example is this remarkably well-preserved cotton tunic, illustrated in figure 1.1, which comes from one of the cave burials at Sanga, an archaeological site located in the Bandiagara escarpment in what is now Mali. It is made of narrow cotton strips sewn together and tailored, and like many of the roughly five hundred other garment fragments discovered at the site, it displays a repeat pattern woven with white and indigo-dyed thread. Skeletal remains associated with this tunic date to the eleventh or twelfth century.22
FIGURE 1.1 Cotton tunic, eleventh or twelfth c. CE, Cave C, Sanga, Bandiagara escarpment, Mali. Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, The
