The Arrival of Europeans

EARLY MODERN AFRICA and the WIDER WORLD HIST 1301 | History The Arrival of Europeans Three historic trade routes crossed the Sahara Desert, as Europeans had long known. The road connected Timbuktu to Taghaza in the western Sahara. A second road ran farther east, linking commercial centres in Hausaland with the oasis town of Ghadames. At last, a path existed that linked Bornu, located in the interior of Central Africa, with Tripoli, a significant Mediterranean port city. But centuries of caravan commerce had not made these routes any less dangerous. Therefore, the greatest people to manage and benefit from trans-Saharan commerce were those who understood the routes, the locations of important cities and oasis, and the inherent hazards associated with Saharan weather patterns. Therefore, it was better for the caravanners and travellers who were Muslim and Arab to monopolise this expertise. Sharing it would cause their earnings to decrease. As a result, European maps of interior Africa remained imprecise; distances were only approximations, and major towns like Timbuktu and Kano were only approximate locations. When Europeans considered the likelihood of a hostile merchant community and the fear of attacks, they concluded that travelling across the Sahara alone would probably be disastrous. However, once the Americas were discovered and the cost of travelling there to establish rival colonies heightened the pressure on European nations to increase their sources of national income in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. European nations wanted more and more to get beyond the middlemen that dominated the trade in luxury products from far-off places and essential raw resources like gold from Africa, spices from Indonesia, and Chinese silk. Removing these merchants' monopolies, which were frequently backed by nations and kingdoms that profited from them, was no simple task. For European nations with lower incomes, like Portugal, the challenge was fairly formidable. Securing West African gold was the Portuguese's primary objective when they started sailing the coast of West Africa, not finding a new trade route to India. Since Sudanic gold was imported in the fourteenth century as a raw material to manufacture European coins, Europeans were aware of the goldfields in the area. As the trans-Saharan trade routes extended to the island of Arguin, the Portuguese had established themselves along the Senegalese coast by the mid-fifteenth century. They raided Amazigh settlements there, took captives to be sold into slavery on Iberian plantations, and explored the Senegal and Gambia Rivers in search of gold. These endeavours represent a few of the first attempts by Europeans to directly participate in trans-Saharan trade. In addition, the Portuguese crown employed explorers like the Venetian slaver Alvise Cadamosto, who was tasked with exploring the Senegambia area. Through their encounters with the Wolof, who traded enslaved individuals along West African interior trade routes, the Portuguese were able to gain a better understanding of the extent of trans-Saharan commerce. A fort on the African coast south of the Akan goldfields, Elmina (meaning "the mine") was built by the Portuguese a few decades after Cadamosto had met the vassal kings of Mali in the Gambia region. Elmina, a fortified trading post in modern-day Ghana, was where the Portuguese exchanged Africans for Akan gold by exchanging copper, brass, and cloth. The Portuguese purchased slaves from Benin, which were later sold to Mande-speaking Dyula dealers, were another source of labour for the Akan mines. By the start of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese had also made inroads into the cowrie-shell currency industry in West Africa, offering luxury products and shells to the local market in return for additional gold. They gradually rerouted commerce down the coast of West Africa and away from the ancient trans-Saharan trade routes. In the 1470s, the Portuguese made landfall on the two islands in the Gulf of Guinea, São Tomé and Príncipe. They were valued for their strategic location off the coast of West Africa, as well as their tropical temperature and volcanic soil, which made them perfect for growing and extracting sugar. By 1500, they had successfully populated both. Large-scale sugar plantations quickly appeared on the islands, and the Portuguese quickly established themselves as dominant forces in the Gulf of Guinea. A large workforce is needed for the infamously labor-intensive process of producing sugar. Chiefdoms in Africa and coastal middlemen had shown the Portuguese that they were prepared to sell prisoners so that the Europeans might use them as labourers when required. In fact, São Tomé's plantation economy required more slave labour as it flourished. The island was the main source of sugar for Europe by the early sixteenth century, and the immigrants there used Elmina to acquire a sizable workforce in slavery. The first transatlantic journeys of African captives sold into slavery in the Americas occurred less than 40 years after the Portuguese settled São Tomé and Príncipe. Chiefs across the African continent saw a chance to make money, so they launched attacks against their neighbours to capture people who might be sold to Europeans, mostly the Portuguese but also the Dutch, Spanish, French, and English. Tensions erupted among African polities as they either participated in or opposed the expanding traffic in enslaved persons as rivalry among the European powers to establish trading ports along the coast of West Africa increased. Then, at the Battle of Tondibi (1591), the Moroccan army destroyed Songhai, the biggest and most potent of the sixteenth-century Sudanic kingdoms, irreversibly changing the geopolitical landscape of West Africa. In the absence of a strong central government, a number of little nations arose, its leaders seeing the advantages of doing business with affluent Europeans directly as opposed to via the antiquated system of caravan commerce. The number and extent of the trade in African enslaved persons changed dramatically as a result of these advances; it went from a few thousand in the sixteenth century to tens of thousands in the seventeenth, and throughout the most of the next century, an average of around forty-five thousand individuals annually.