Video Lesson

Lesson Objectives

After learning this lesson, you will be able to:

• explain how trade affected the relationships between people across different geographic regions;
• make a list of trading items that were exchanged in the Trans-Saharan-Trade;
• appreciate the role of trade in bringing different people having different ideas across different regions.

Brainstorming Questions

• Why do you think it was important to travel as part of a group (caravan)?
• What made the camel a very important pack animal in the Trans-Saharan-Caravan trade?

Key Terms

The Trans-Saharan Caravan Trade

Before the 15th and 16th centuries, Europeans knew little about Africa, and interactions between its regions were limited. However, trade played a vital role in connecting different parts of the continent. Maritime trade routes linked north-east and south-east Africa with the Swahili coast, facilitating cultural and economic exchanges. Ancient Egyptian pharaohs conducted expeditions to Punt, illustrating early transcontinental trade in Africa. Additionally, trade routes across the Sahara Desert connected North Africa, West Africa, and East Africa, fostering the exchange of goods, ideas, and technologies over vast distances within the continent.

The trans-Saharan caravan trade began to take place on a regular basis during the fourth century among peoples of the forest, savanna, Sahel, and Sahara. While Ghana was an integral part of the early trans-Saharan trade, neither it nor any other Western Sudan state was built by the trans-Saharan trade. Fundamentally, important to the success of the Empire of Ghana between the eighth and twelfth centuries, this trading system reached its peak during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, during the heydays of the Mali and Songhai
Empires. In the period from 500 A.D to1590 A.D, routes rose and declined in importance depending on the empire in power and the amount of security it could maintain for traders and trade routes.

The major trade routes can be divided in to three. These were the North-South, West-East, and Southern routes. In the North-South and West-East routes, camel formed the major pack animal that made transportation of goods and merchants possible. Egypt in Africa and
Mecca in the Near East were the last destinations of merchants in the east. In the Southern route that stretched upto the Hausa city-states, donkeys, human porters or canoes were used. Some of the major market centers include Fez, and Marrakesh in Morocco, Sijilmasa, Wadan, Audaghost, Takrur, Taghaza, Tichitt-Walata, Djenné, Wargla, Timbuktu, Tripoli, Ghadames, Ghat, Takedda, Katsina, Kano, Fezzan, Bilma, Bauchi, Cyrenaicain, and Wadai. Wangara, Bambuk, Bure, and Lobi-pourra were the major gold fields of the Western Sudan. Trade Commodities and Pattern: -Salt, which was plenty in North Africa, gold, which was plenty in West Africa, and slaves were the essential commodities throughout the 500-
1590 period. Cloth had also become an important trade good. A viable cloth-production industry began around the eleventh century in Djenné, Takrur, Timbuktu, and Gao and lasted well into the eighteenth century. By the eleventh century a typical caravan included
one thousand camels. It might, for example, set out from Sijilmasa in North Africa loaded with salt from Taghaza, foodstuffs, cloth, perfumes, and other goods from the Maghrib. Its next stop was Wadan, an oasis in the present-day nation of Mauritania, where some of the goods were sold and new items purchased; then the caravan went to Walata or Tichitt on the southern edge of the Sahara, and finally it went on to Timbuktu. From there the salt and other products would likely be taken by canoe to Niani or Djenné, where the salt was broken into smaller pieces and carried into the forest areas by the slave porters and donkeys of the Dyula-Wangara. These traveling merchants trade the salt and other items from the north for forest gold, kola nuts, animal hides, and other products, and then returned to Djenné, Niani, and Timbuktu.