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CHAPTER ONE

Buyers and Sellers in Cross-Cultural Trade

LONG BEFORE the beginning of Atlantic commerce, camel caravans linked tropical West Africa to the Mediterranean basin and western Asia through a complex system of interlocking trans-Saharan trading networks.¹ Referred to by early Muslim geographers as Bilad al-Sudan, The Lands of the Black People, West Africa became famous in Islamic communities after Mansa Musa, leader of the Mali Empire, which was the principal supplier of gold to the Mediterranean world, dispensed lavish gifts of gold in Cairo as he passed through on his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324. Mali’s renown spread even farther, into the courts of Christian medieval Europe, via the Catalan Atlas, a richly illustrated map drawn between 1375 and 1380 and given as a gift from the king of Aragon to Charles V. It depicts the “known world” at that time with Europe, the Near East, Asia, and North Africa shown in relation to one another and interconnected by travel and trade, including sub-Saharan African kingdoms and their major entrepôts such as Gao and Timbuktu. The visual imagery on the map ranges widely from detailed renderings of architecture and geographical features to local varieties of flora and fauna and items of commercial interest. Among the individual figures depicted is a profile of Mali’s leader, shown seated on a throne, adorned with European-style crown and scepter and holding up a large nugget of gold as a sign of his empire’s storied wealth. Facing him is an approaching merchant mounted on a camel, dressed in the characteristic turban and veil of Saharan Berbers. The map conveys the message that he is one of our allies—a generous and trustworthy trading partner and a major source of gold for the coinage system of Eurasian trade. Henceforth West Africa in the minds of Europeans became legendary as a “Land of Gold.” And it was the hope of securing direct access to sub-Saharan African gold, as well as to the spice and silk trade of Asia, that propelled Portuguese mariners to explore Africa’s western coastline in the fifteenth century, thus opening up the Guinea trade and a new Atlantic era in world history.²

This chapter lays out the trading networks and protocols Europeans encountered on the Upper Guinea Coast as direct Euro-African maritime commerce developed. The major regional and interregional commodity currencies of West Africa, originally tied to trans-Saharan trade, would be deployed in new directions and along new axes while Europeans added greater supplies of them, thus reshaping the structure and intensifying the dynamics of commercial operations between the coast and interior regions. At the same time, the business of trading and how it was carried out tended to follow well-established patterns and arrangements that had existed for hundreds of years. Added to familiar ways of calculating measures and values came new ones from the Atlantic. With the arrival of Europeans—first the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, then the Dutch, English, and French in the 1600s—this new Euro-African commercial zone expanded on local African practices while at the same time creating new networks and patterns of trade.

Money: Commodity Currencies

Much of the system that Portuguese caravels skirting Africa’s north Atlantic coastline in the fifteenth century were entering was in the hands of specialist Muslim merchant groups known generally as Juula. Based mainly in regions along the southern shore of the Sahara, Juula merchants created extensive trade diasporas that linked major trans-Saharan routes with myriad local, regional, and interregional networks to the south.³ Evidence from archaeological sites and from Arabic written sources provides a general indication of just how extensive these networks were, reaching overland and along rivers to connect towns and cities in the grasslands and forests there with the primary entrepôts of Saharan caravan traffic. Prominent among the surviving material remains of this commercial system are foreign manufactures that crossed the desert and found their way as far as the tropical rainforests, well before the arrival of the Portuguese. For example, two archaeological sites at Igbo-Ukwu (in modern southeast Nigeria) are especially significant on this score. Among the priestly burial, regalia, and treasure unearthed at those sites is a spectacular trove of over 165,000 trade beads from the Mediterranean and Asia. Dating to the ninth or tenth century, the sites provide us with general temporal markers for the economic history of West Africa. They indicate that on the eve of the second millennium communities deep in the rainforest belt were indirectly linked with avenues of trans-Saharan trade, receiving beads that came from distant towns in Africa or beyond.⁴

MAP 1.1 Places mentioned in chapter 1. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP.

This material evidence also presents visually dazzling corroboration of the rather cursory references to trade beads in the Arabic-language written sources. There is, however, an important caveat: the beads themselves are of only limited use in identifying specifically where they came from. Red beads made of carnelian, for example, which were found at both Igbo Ukwu and Gao, might have been from Gao itself or, alternatively, from other known supply centers as far away as Egypt or India. Monochrome glass beads found in those same sites and others could have been from Morocco, Egypt, or the Near East, which were the major known suppliers of such beads between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.⁵ Whatever their precise origins, however, beads from these early archaeological sites are important historical sources for understanding West Africa as a socially diverse zone of bead connoisseurship that persisted into and during the era of Atlantic trade with Europeans.

Commercial exchanges depended on various forms of West African currencies—what they were, how they were valued, and specifically where and how they circulated. It is important to note that during the centuries of trans-Saharan trade, West African merchants did not adopt coinage from North Africa as a general form of currency south of the desert, although limited numbers of gold dinars and silver dirhams did at times circulate in some cities and towns. Instead, they continued to use commodity currencies, the major West African ones being gold dust, rock salt, cotton textiles, bar iron, and sea salt, along with cowry shells from the Indian Ocean. These items served as general-purpose currencies largely because demand for them was widespread, steady, and consistently high. They were important as trade goods and also functioned as money, being used as a medium of exchange, as a store of value, and as units of account in valuation and pricing. Each had its own history. Some were products rooted in local natural resource endowments, and some were the products of far-off contacts and cultural influences arising out of long-standing ties with the wider Islamic world. Sufficiently detailed histories of these currencies are not yet possible owing to the very limited written and archaeological sources for documenting them, but there is no doubt that they worked together over time as a flexible, fluctuating, and interlocking system of currency flows across West Africa’s geographical and linguistically rich social landscape.

The largest regional currency zone, extending over much of the West African interior, owed its existence to the importance of the trans-Saharan caravan trade. In this zone people reckoned prices and exchanged goods based on units of African gold, imported cowry shells, and Saharan rock salt. The other three currencies—cotton textiles, bar iron, and sea salt—circulated in and between smaller subregions and also into and out of Muslim trading networks. Sea salt produced along the coast was regularly sought out by inland merchants, especially those who had ready access to the strips of woven cotton cloth that artisans in the savanna and Sahel zones produced for export. Salt producers on the coast, for their part, preferred to bargain for cotton textiles, which were also accepted in exchange for gold in gold-producing areas and for captive humans in other places. Blacksmiths with access to locally smelted iron, either directly or by trade, worked it out into standard-sized units that Europeans called “bar iron,” which then circulated as local and regional currencies in markets across West Africa.⁶

Combining the known production centers and circulation zones of these commodity currencies and plotting them on a map of West Africa presents a useful summary overview of the complexity of trade and commerce there ca. 1500. Map 1.2 includes the richest goldfields and Saharan rock-salt deposits, the central zone of cowry circulation, and major production centers of bar iron and cotton textiles for export. Coastal sea salt–producing areas were many and changing and so are not individually shown. In addition, the map shows prominent supply areas of kola nuts, mainly because of their importance in linking the forest zones where they grew to consumer markets for them in the savanna and Sahel regions. There they were of great cultural and social value—as well as being a source of caffeine—and served as a respectable welcoming gift among many peoples, Muslims and polytheists alike. However, since they were perishable and therefore difficult to store for very long, they were a consumer product and not, strictly speaking, a major currency-like store of value. The map also includes areas of copper extraction, but the volume of production and circulation of local copper was relatively limited, thus setting up a significant opportunity for European importers of the metal and its alloys, brass and bronze. The basic spatial organization and material logic of West Africa’s trading networks shown in the map allows for a sharper recognition and appreciation of Africa’s participation in early modern Atlantic trade.

MAP 1.2 Production and circulation of commodity currencies in West Africa, ca. 1500. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP.

Of the six major commodity currencies, iron was probably the oldest. Early evidence for smelting iron ore comes from archaeological sites in what is now Senegal, Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon, all of them roughly dating to the sixth century BCE. For the upper Niger River valley in what is now Mali, evidence of iron working dates from the earliest occupation of a major town in the region, Jenne-jeno, in the third century BCE. Especially intriguing is the fact that smelting iron ore and forging it into useful implements and symbols of prestige were being carried out in locations that were some distance from both the ore deposits and the special hardwood trees necessary for making the charcoal that fueled the region’s furnaces and forges. Such a complex spatial organization of the several components of iron production suggests a divided and specialized labor force that, for unknown reasons, had invested in these added costs of transport.⁷ If and when a bar iron currency was adopted there is not presently known. Similarly, little is known specifically about the subsequent transfers of iron technology to other locales and workers, but it can be inferred that the knowledge and skills traveled local, regional, and interregional trade routes alongside iron products and other goods. As the southerly extension of trans-Saharan trade took on greater significance and intensity after the seventh century CE, it is likely that smelters and smiths would have become more productive and diversified their iron wares with the increasing connections to new markets.

Then, in the second millennium, two gradual historical changes began that reshaped the human geography of West Africa and also the contours of its trading networks. One was a drier climate that prompted large scale southerly demographic movements and concentrations of people in new towns and settlements. The other was an expansion and intensification of Muslim trade across the Sahara, which increased the number of Muslims—both immigrants and local converts—among the populations of sub-Saharan Africa. These economic and cultural transformations led, in turn, to new sources and greater supplies of commodity currencies and more widespread circulation of them.

Climatic change brought transfers of iron technology into new geographical areas and communities. A dry period, lasting from ca. 1100 to ca. 1500, extended the reach of the Sahara’s southern “shore,” driving people southward in search of rainfall adequate for farming. Among them were iron smelters and smiths. By the end of the period, important new iron production centers had arisen in the Futa Jallon massif and the Konyan highlands, both of them mountainous areas that lay on the timber-rich forest edge in the hinterland of the Upper Guinea Coast.⁸ Even though accessible surface deposits of iron ore were not unusual in West Africa and could be exploited in many locales on small scales, by the sixteenth century these two places in particular became major producers and exporters of bar iron.⁹

Standard units of bar iron currency usually took the form of semifinished tools or implements that were useful in land clearance, farming, hunting, or war, as well as being widely recognized units of value. Unfortunately, however, there is little to go by in knowing specifically what some of the earliest forms of bar iron were like. They remain obscure because metallic iron tends not to survive in the archaeological record, especially in tropical soils. Examples observed in later times can nonetheless suggest a range of possibilities. André Álvares de Almada, a Luso-African merchant from the Cape Verde Islands who traveled and lived at times on the Upper Guinea Coast in the second half of the sixteenth century, described a form of locally made bar iron being traded up the Gambia River at that time. He took care to note that it was the product of local mining and smelting operations, and he described the physical bars as measuring a hand-span long, three fingers wide at one end, and two fingers wide at the other. Among the dealers in this bar iron, Luso-African merchants were especially keen to have it for their trading voyages to the bays south of the Gambia River around Cacheu and Bissau.¹⁰ High demand for bar iron in these latter two locales, together with the description of its form and dimensions, suggest that this particular bar iron unit was a semifinished quantity of the metal based either on agricultural tools, such as a hatchet or hoe blade, or on a personal weapon such as a knife blade.

A later example of bar iron, the famous so-called Kissi pennies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was a much smaller currency form most likely based on a generic arrowhead. These particular units circulated among a number of different language groups in the forest and savanna areas of modern Sierra Leone, northern Liberia, and southern Guinea-Conakry.¹¹ That there were so many specific kinds of useful iron products meant that blacksmiths in different locales had the option of shaping particular bar iron currency units, from small ones to large, both “trademarking” their own products and serving a complex consumer market made up of distinctive and various local needs and preferences.

However, several factors set limits on iron smelting that made it difficult to generate a sustained high-volume production of locally made iron. The hardwood trees preferred for making charcoal fuel became scarce at times through overexploitation, for example, especially in locales where smelters regularly operated large shaft furnaces in smelts that lasted several days or up to a week at a time. Other types of West African smelting furnaces were smaller and so required less charcoal, but they were able to produce only modest amounts of workable iron per smelt. Additional limitations came from the restriction of smelting to the dry season and from the control master smelters exerted over access to iron smelting technology and the specialized skills for carrying it out. Taking these limitations together, it is likely that blacksmiths’ potential demand for supplies of smelted iron and consumers’ demand for their finished iron products were not easily or consistently met. This general fluctuating scarcity helps explain in part why West Africans placed such a relatively high value on iron and why, in turn, European merchants in the era of Atlantic trade encountered such robust markets for their overseas bar iron, especially along the Upper Guinea Coast.

West Africa’s other major historical change between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries—a steady growth in its population of Muslims—led to an increasing influence of Islam in its economies, cultures, and urban life. Al-Bakri, in a manuscript completed in Andalusia in 1068, provided general descriptions of what he called the kingdoms of Gao on the middle Niger River, Takrur in the valley of the Senegal, and Ghana between them on the edge of the desert. He drew his views of these kingdoms from knowledge and direct observations of Muslim travelers and traders as well as from the hearsay they had picked up south of the desert. Taking care to point out the towns in which there were mosques and resident Muslims, he also noted the persistence of polytheistic belief and customs in some locales, including among the leaders of important kingdoms such as Ghana. Other telling details—about the gold trade, the significant numbers of Muslim scholars and legal experts in Ghana, and the prominent positions of Muslims as advisors to its king—would have sent a welcome signal to his readers that their faith was on the rise south of the Sahara.¹² And this was indeed the case.

Eighty-six years later the Moroccan geographer al-Idrisi provided valuable additions to what was already known about The Land of the Black People, including news that Ghana’s king was now a practicing Muslim. He also passed on general information about the alluvial goldfields adjacent to the kingdom and the vigorous and lucrative trade in gold northward to the Maghreb, where it was minted into dinar coins. Matters of dress were also of great interest, especially when they indicated that there were peoples south of the Sahara who displayed a Muslim sense of sartorial propriety. Respectable Islamic clothing consisted of waist-wrappers, mantles, tailored shirts, and loose-fitting trousers, made of either local cotton or imported wool or silk.¹³

Regular extraction of gold from deposits located south of the Sahara helped create an interregional currency zone and an early and important north–south axis of trade out of the goldfields and across the desert to North Africa. Muslim Berber merchants traveling southward from Morocco and Tunisia purchased rock salt that had been mined in Saharan deposits and then cut into standard-sized slabs by slaves from southern non-Muslim regions. They carried their units of rock salt onward to the edge of the desert, where they sold it to specialist long-distance Muslim Juula merchants for an agreed-upon measure of gold. Arabic was the language these merchants had in common, at least for trading purposes. Rock-salt slabs thus entered Juula networks and circulated widely in West Africa as a currency valued either by weight or by linear measure, especially in areas where sea salt was scarce.

The gold dust people exchanged in and around West Africa’s towns and cities 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 Netherlands, RV-B237–755.

However, precisely when and where major cotton production centers arose is very incompletely known, especially for the period before 1500. The earliest written information about cotton and cotton textile manufacture in sub-Saharan West Africa comes from al-Bakri’s eleventh-century compilation in which he states that the currencies of Sila (in the lower Senegal River valley) consisted of sorghum, salt, copper rings, and lengths of finely woven cotton. Weavers produced the cloth in a neighboring town where many households grew cotton on a small scale, apparently as a perennial. Al-Umari noted in the fourteenth century that one of the currencies in Kanem, in the vicinity of Lake Chad well to the east, was a locally woven cotton strip cloth, and that Mali, far to the west, was reportedly cultivating much cotton and producing high-quality cotton textiles.²³ By the time of the Guinea trade, European explorers and merchants took note of places such as Senegambia on the Upper Guinea Coast and the Bight of Benin in the Gulf of Guinea where cotton textiles were available for export to other coastal markets. As Euro-African trade expanded, locally made cotton currencies remained necessary for purchasing provisions and paying for labor. They thus continued to be produced in competition with the higher-priced cotton imports from overseas.²⁴

West African cotton currencies circulated as narrow strips or breadths of various widths—woven on local handlooms and calculated as standard units based on the number of lengths that would make a finished cloth or item of clothing. Al-Bakri’s report about the currencies in the lower Senegal River valley noted the cotton currency there circulated in lengths he referred to as izar, the Arabic word for mantle, the most basic and versatile of garments. Kanem’s cotton currency as described by al-Umari circulated in lengths of ten cubits (the forearm length from the middle finger tip to the elbow bottom), and purchases could be made using fractions from one cubit upwards. Imported cowries, beads, copper pieces, and silver coins also circulated there as currency, but their values were calculated in terms of the local cotton cloth units. Al-Umari also noted that the excellent white woven cotton of Mali was called kamisiya, from the Arabic qamis, a generic term for shirt.²⁵

These cotton currency units, based on linear measures of cloth or sometimes in reference to a garment, continued to be standard into and throughout the era of Atlantic trade. Álvares de Almada described a former time on the Upper Guinea Coast, probably when he lived there in the mid-sixteenth century, when Luso-African merchants could safely lodge with local nobles and purchase slaves very cheaply. They paid for them in cows and cloths called sigas, which he described as a fixed length of the cotton currency called teada. Major cotton currencies along the Guinea Coast were known in many West African languages by the vernacular names for wrapper-size cloths.²⁶

The passage of more goods and commodity currencies through the Sahara, the Sahel, and the savannas, rainforests, and coastal regions depended on the variations of seasonal working patterns, the frequencies and locations of trans-Saharan caravan arrivals, and the fluctuating intensities of local mining, processing, and workshop production. The West Africa that European merchants encountered was much more than the “Land of Gold” they dreamed of. Though not a fully integrated economic system or single market, it was a dynamic multicentric zone of trade and currency flows as well as other exchanges and transfers of all sorts. Trade languages reached widely across the landscape, and more people became polylingual. West African merchants and traders became increasingly flexible and adept at working with various methods of measuring and counting goods; farmers and artisans familiarized themselves with and mastered new skills, tools, and technological knowledge; and cultural values were subject to change as consumers acquired new tastes for alternative modes of dress and social behavior. The economies of West Africa together formed a large-scale intercommunicating zone supporting a long-standing history of trading ties to North Africa, the Mediterranean basin, and other distant lands.

Atlantic Trading and the “Language of Goods”

Early Euro-African trade on the Upper Guinea Coast relied heavily on two of the major regional commodity currencies—bar iron and narrow strips of cotton cloth—that skilled artisans produced locally in standard units of linear measurement. Whether or not exchanged in their material forms, they served multiple functions as currencies of account and in reckoning market values and prices. In contrast to European currency systems, there was no government minting of coinage. But similar to coins, which historically have often been altered or melted down and turned into jewelry or luxury goods, these currencies had their own use values as well, which worked against debasement. Doubling as important basic commodities, bar iron and cotton strips could easily be taken out of circulation to be used for practical purposes if the need or desire arose. Each was also an intermediate good, that is, a semifinished material that skilled hands might turn into a well-known and valuable finished product. In the hands of blacksmiths, bar iron was fashioned into all sorts of useful tools, blade weapons, and productive agricultural implements. Cotton strips could be sewn by hand to become a wide wrapper called “country cloth” that a man or woman would wear draped around the body. Taken to skilled tailors, cotton strips were also made into sewn shirts and trousers worn by men. Iron and cotton thus moved into and out of currency flows, presenting another set of opportunities for their artisan producers.

European trading on the Guinea Coast has often been characterized simplistically as ad hoc “barter” for curiosities of little value, but what actually took place was much more complex than this stereotype allows. West African coastal trade was based on exchanges of two carefully calculated assortments, or bundles, of goods that were subject to differing valuations by the two parties. Each assortment consisted of a variety of goods that were negotiated and composed during the transaction. Assortments thus changed according to local negotiators and their circumstances. And over time, as supplies of and demands for specific commodities fluctuated, values of them in relation to one another changed as well. Furthermore, descriptions of particular commercial transactions illustrate that certain goods could serve as a measure of value for pricing and bargaining only, whereas corresponding quantities of other goods actually changed hands in payment. Parties who engaged in these transactions therefore had to make numerous and ongoing mental calculations, employing a special “language” of goods, specifying their names, their presumed unit values, and their equivalent valuations in relation to other goods. Each party could calculate by considering his or her own costs, values, and estimated profits and translating these into the language of goods shared with their counterparts. Though assortment bargaining on the Guinea Coast thus presented significant social, linguistic, and cultural challenges to parties on both sides, its flexibility offered a range of possible outcomes—deals could be sealed relatively smoothly and quickly, or difficult and protracted negotiations could be pursued with varying degrees of success, leading in some instances even to agreements to disagree.

Reliable commercial intelligence about the availability and origin of certain goods was key to successful trading on both sides, as were calculations of the current relative market values of goods. In some cases, parties would negotiate specific prices in good-for-good equivalences for major components of the bundles. But for the most part bargaining was primarily about the compositions of the assortments—which particular goods to include, their specific qualities, and how many of each. Instead of haggling over unit prices for each commodity, which would have been an overly cumbersome and time-consuming process, parties resolved variabilities of supply, quality, and demand by coming to agreement on the “mix” of the goods on hand at the moment. Crucial to the strategies of both parties was the inclusion of a wide range of goods—some cheap, others much more expensive. When they finally agreed on the two assortments—including, for example, undersized captives as well as strong adult males from the Africans, cheap beads as well as coral and long iron bars from the Europeans—and considered them as equivalent in value, the goods changed hands. And every completed assortment made a social statement about the buyer. An assortment selected by an African buyer represented his or her human geography and the cultural norms and preferences of specific consumers or customers he or she had in mind.²⁷ A European’s assortment represented long supply chains and specific labor settings that determined the various destinations of their captives and other exports.

Some specialized West African merchants employed “arbitrage trading” to substantially increase their profit margins. “Arbitrage” is an economist’s term for taking advantage of differing prices for a given good in distant and distinct markets by moving the good from one to the other. In the case of Upper Guinea’s Atlantic trade specifically, new patterns of arbitrage trading developed between Europeans on the coast and suppliers and consumers in the interior. Detailed accounts of arbitrage demonstrate that a canny and intrepid trader who was armed with up-to-date commercial intelligence and willing to invest the necessary travel time could leverage his exchanges advantageously. Arbitrage was the practice of Juula long-distance merchants in the West African interior and also of some Luso-African traders on the coast in the early seventeenth century who linked the mainland to the offshore Cape Verde Islands and to Portugal (fig. 1.2). In this form of trade, rooted in the earlier, western African commercial system, a merchant would structure multiple trading routes in strategically selected segments going from one location to another and based on current pricing differences, which could be skillfully exploited to produce greater profit margins. A well-known account shows how merchants from the Cape Verde Islands leveraged a local salt resource through several steps into the final goal, which was a considerable sum of Spanish silver or its equivalent.

The trade we called “coastal” is mostly undertaken, in small ships . . . by Portuguese who live on Santiago Island [in the Cape Verde archipelago]. First they load these with salt, which they conveniently obtain for nothing on the islands of Maio and Sal in the Cape Verde Islands, and they sail to Serra-Lioa with the salt and trade it for gold, ivory, and kola. Then from Serra-Lioa they sail again to Joala and Porto d’Ale in Senegal, where they trade a portion of the kola for cotton cloths. They also sometimes trade ivory obtained in Serra-Lioa for Cape Verde cloths. From there they sail again east to Cacheo, where they trade the rest of their kola and their remaining goods for slaves. They acquire fifty to sixty slaves in exchange for the goods they have obtained by trade along the coast, and each slave is worth to them 150 reals, or pieces-of-eight. So they make 9,000–10,000 reals out of nothing, in a manner of speaking. For they are willing to put up with any discomfort, to an astonishing extent; and when they occasionally catch fish or come to a place like Serra-Lioa where everything is cheap, they eat like wolves.²⁸

Arbitrage trading overland as practiced by the Juula Jahaanke of the upper Senegal River involved the intersection of a north–south axis of trade in gold and captives across the Sahara with an east–west trade in captives and overseas imports between the interior and the coast. A late seventeenth-century account of it featured exchanges for European goods on the coast, but Jahaanke merchants could just as easily have followed this same trading pattern before the Atlantic era by offering cotton textiles from inland in exchange for coastal sea salt. It began with Jahaanke merchants taking loads of locally woven cloth from Bundu on the upper Senegal River to the neighboring Bambuk goldfields, where they sold the cloth for gold. Traveling north to a desert-side entrepôt called “Tarra,” they were then in a strong position to negotiate with merchants specializing in the gold trade to North Africa. The Jahaanke, for their part, could profitably use their gold also to purchase whatever male captives there were on hand who remained unsold, for it was usually the case that Muslim slave markets in and across the Sahara preferred women and children. From Tarra, Jahaanke caravans forced their captive men to march overland to the upper Gambia River. There they met up with merchants from downriver who were supplying the Atlantic and American markets, which preferred male slaves, and quickly sold them away in exchange for European imports. Some of these Atlantic goods could then be used to purchase gold in the Bambuk goldfields, thus beginning new circuits of arbitrage trading.²⁹

FIGURE 1.2 Map of the Upper Guinea Coast and the Cape Verde Islands. The National Archives of the UK, Nicolas Sanson, L’Afrique en plusieurs cartes nouvelles (Paris, 1656).

Specialized merchants such as the Jahaanke were known to Europeans as being particularly adept at initiating, negotiating, and closing deals. And deals were complicated. They involved making a series of offers and refusals, some real and others feigned, on the composition of specific trade goods in each assortment to be exchanged and on the relative values of the assortments as expressed in an agreed currency of account. Francisco de Lemos Coelho, a Portuguese merchant based in the Cape Verde Islands who lived for twenty-three years in the mid-seventeenth century on the Upper Guinea Coast, recorded what he had seen of Jahaanke merchants conducting their business. Jahaanke-led caravans of merchants and their loads of goods and provisions were among the largest in the hinterlands of the Upper Guinea Coast. They regularly set out from their homelands in November as the dry season opened roads. By the time they reached the entrepôt of Barrakunda up the Gambia River in July, their caravans had swelled to several thousand people, including large numbers of captives, over two thousand donkeys, and quantities of ivory, cotton textiles, and gold. Some of the merchants continued on down to the coast, where they purchased salt with a portion of their cotton cloth. Others remained on the spot to do business with Europeans who came upriver to purchase captives, ivory, gold, and cotton cloth. It appears that the privileged and highly respected and powerful Muslim clerics who led them possessed the authority to negotiate market prices and deal directly with European agents. Several caravan leaders would meet with agents to agree on a fair equivalency in the commodities they carried for a fixed, often fictional, length of cloth, for example, and on how a purchase price was to be paid in practice, such as in units of writing paper (reams or quires), in beads, or in a combination of the two. Once these equivalents were established, the rest of the individual merchant sellers converged on the scene and, according to this witness, engaged in nonstop intense trading for up to twenty-four hours. As with Álvares de Almada in the previous century, Coelho remarked admiringly that he saw no evidence of cheating or theft.³⁰

Other merchant groups handled their commercial exchanges through whatever different procedures they found acceptable, but again, prices would be expressed in a currency of account while the actual payments would be made in other goods and currencies of exchange. Coelho witnessed smaller caravans of a hundred men or fewer arriving at Barrakunda from nearby areas and gave a description of how these merchants operated. What they hoped for was to sell their captives and ivory tusks and to be paid as much as possible in salt, but in this case they did not have a hand in deciding and setting prices. Trading was allowed to commence only after local officials in charge of the venue determined what the relative prices of goods and values of currency units would be in their domains. The example given by Coelho was for the largest and best-quality ivory tusk, which was priced at a notional ten cotton cloths. That price was to be paid partly in salt, whose value had been set per single dry unit of measure, in this case, a bowl of a certain standard size. Prices for other possible “payment goods” were then set in relation to the units of cloth and salt. What is most interesting is what Coelho had to say about the trade at Barrakunda in gold. Valuation of the precious metal in relation to other currencies and goods was such that European merchants who bought it discovered that it was not as profitable as buying other commodities and selling them later for gold-equivalent paper or favors of the powerful in European economies. In speaking of Atlantic commerce, Coelho claimed that European merchants could realize much greater eventual profits in this part of the Guinea Coast by dealing in ivory or captives rather than gold.³¹ Whether or not he was deliberately trying to avoid royal interference in a profitable transaction by downplaying gold as a trade item there, it was indeed the case that Africa’s gold exports in Atlantic trade came not so much from Upper Guinea as they did from the Gold Coast.

Bar iron was the essential commodity currency for Europeans trading on the Upper Guinea Coast. We see indications of concentration on this highly useful metal from the start with the establishment of Portuguese settlements on the Cape Verde Islands in the 1460s and then, increasingly in the 1500s, among the communities that lançados (men of Portuguese descent operating independently along the coast) were establishing on the mainland. Attempts by the Portuguese crown to regulate the commerce of these settler-traders and their Luso-African descendants were chronically unsuccessful as they evaded royal decrees and continued to work privately and independently, in direct competition with the official trade of Portuguese monarchs. Among the decrees issued in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to control these outlaws were regulations that specifically prohibited the sale of iron on the Guinea Coast, a convincing indication of its strategic importance. Local Portuguese interests, lançados and Cape Verde Islanders, were reportedly using it especially in transactions for the purchase of captives and ivory.³² Where this iron was from, whether it was locally produced bar iron acquired in arbitrage trade or European bar iron either transshipped from Lisbon through the islands or acquired illicitly from other European traders in the vicinity, or a combination of all of the above, is not clear.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, small numbers of French and English merchants began to intrude on the Upper Guinea Coast. But they did so only in fits and starts since they were initially ill-equipped and hesitant to challenge Portugal’s long-standing claims to trade with Africa. What trading they did was centered mainly on the Senegal River, along the Petite Côte, the coast between the Gambia River and south to the vicinity of Sherbro Island, and much farther south and east on the Gold Coast. These merchants were in search of captives, intermediate goods for European markets such as hides and ivory, and, above all, gold. Armed clashes with vessels manned by local lançados and Portuguese alike kept any serious expansion of the foreigners’ trade there in check.

It is therefore of interest to consider the vituperative remarks of Álvares de Almada, who described commerce on the Upper Guinea Coast in the late sixteenth century as being in ruin because of the French and the English. His account exaggerates the influence of these newcomers prior to the seventeenth century so as to portray his compatriots as victims in dire need of royal favors. In the past, he complains, many vessels from the Cape Verde Islands had sailed to the mainland to purchase captives, cloth, wax, and ivory in abundance. However, rising competition with agents of French and English merchants had supposedly forced them to abandon the trade. They had bid up prices for African commodities and captives, he claimed, and the former peace and security they had enjoyed with their coastal trading partners no longer existed. In describing so dramatically the decline of Portuguese trade on the Upper Guinea Coast at this time, it is likely that Almada was deliberately using them to bolster his case for a stronger official Portuguese presence there as well as protecting the hidden activities of his fellow islander and lançado merchants.³³

It was the seventeenth century that saw an increasing presence of Dutch, English, and French merchants on the Upper Guinea Coast—predecessors of the RAC—and with them came a flood of European-made bar iron and other overseas commodities. Since much of the larger-scale iron smelting in West Africa was done in regions of the interior, blacksmiths near the coast would have had very limited and uncertain supplies of the metal besides what little they got from recycling. Thus these new Atlantic sources of iron must have significantly enabled the work of these smiths. The Englishman Richard Jobson’s account of his travels on the Gambia River in 1620–21 provides a valuable description of local blacksmiths, their workshops and products, and how much these new supplies of European bar iron were already becoming such a boon to them. He commented that among all of the artisanal occupations he had observed, the most important one was blacksmithing. He described how blacksmiths specialized in working bars of iron metal into finished goods such as swords, javelin blades, arrows, and especially agricultural tools. They themselves were not smelters and so depended on others for their supplies of iron. Therefore, the regular arrival of European bar iron on the coast meant that they and their workshops could flourish as never before. Initially, in Jobson’s time, overseas iron was adapted to the preexisting norms for measuring and circulating locally made bar iron. The long and cumbersome imported European bars had to be cut down into the shorter lengths of their own standard bar iron currency units, which ranged between eight and twelve inches. This important conversion of imported commodity to local currency became a new task for smiths, many of whom traveled from town to town, setting up their workshops and supplying their own anvils, hand tools, charcoal fuel, and skills to work the iron possessed by local residents. Jobson noted that careful monitoring of the work was necessary because smiths were known to help themselves to extra portions of bar iron in the process.³⁴

Demand for iron on this part of the Guinea Coast was particularly strong and continued to be so as the RAC established its presence there. And European bar iron was required especially for purchasing the captives sought by the company. Already in 1615, Cape Verde Islanders were noticing a marked increase in the market prices for captives, complaining that what they used to pay for two prime males was now being charged for a single unhealthy man. One likely reason for this rise in the price for slaves, or for the decrease in the value of imported metal, was the increasing flows of metal coming in mainly on northern European vessels. Luso-African traders, having no direct supplies of iron from Portugal, therefore had to rely on others—first the Spaniards, and then the English.³⁵ Jobson, too, noted the inflation of prices on the coast for slaves. The accepted length of bar iron currency there was twelve inches, but English traders up the Gambia River found that they could get away with using the shorter eight-inch bar iron currency units in calculating and making their purchases.³⁶ In the second half of the seventeenth century, overseas (“voyage”) iron, in one-bar units, became the currency of account for trading by England’s Royal African Company in this region of the Guinea Coast, though at differing valuations, and as such it was integrated into both the English and the West African trading systems.

Gifts and Protocols

European traders had to adapt also to local norms for receiving and hosting strangers and for establishing and maintaining the commercial relationships they offered. Salutations in local languages and offerings of food, drink, and gifts were essential social lubricants that enabled goods to move smoothly along the international channels of exchange. Some of these were regular and institutionalized, whereas others could be personal and idiosyncratic requests of the moment. During Coelho’s twenty-three years of residence on the Upper Guinea Coast, he came to appreciate the local variants of these protocols and how they operated. Referring to the “Jolof coast” (the northern part between the Senegal River and Cape Verde), he advised that European merchants visiting there should not hesitate to be generous to local officials and the nobility and that they should host them regularly, serving them spirits and any other kind of refreshment they might request. He hastened to add a cryptic warning that holding back on such hospitality would not turn to their advantage. Paying proper respects began when first entering the vicinity of a coastal or riverine town with the sending of a respectful message of greeting accompanied by a gift to the local king. The business of buying and selling could not begin until the king’s chosen day when he would arrive to officially exchange gifts, inspect the merchandise, and declare that trading negotiations could then commence.³⁷ Describing a purchase of captives at Ponta in the Bissagos Islands off Bissau, Coelho specified what kind of gifts were required. There, wine was the preferred social drink, whereas elsewhere it was brandy. Small beads were necessary both as a gift and also for purchasing food and other provisions. High-quality textiles were welcome favors to local hosts, who were also entitled to a tip from the seller for each captive sold.³⁸ Gifts operated thusly as a form of customs fee.

Such well-established proprieties assured visitors of good and regular business prospects. Regarding Europeans’ purchases of kola in the environs of Sierra Leone, Coelho alluded to a time before the mid-seventeenth century when Portuguese ship masters were so suspicious and mistrustful of local merchants that they insisted that human pawns or hostages be placed on board as pledges of trust. He went on to say that in his time such wariness was no longer the case and that relations with kola suppliers were consistently productive. What he then described as typical of the kola trade presents another local variant of gift-giving protocols. Arriving ships would send an envoy to the king, who then sent envoys in return to deliver the message of when the king would come to formally greet them. Upon his arrival, accompanied by lesser kings, officials, and nobles, an extended period of feasting and socializing commenced. Ship masters together ceremonially rewarded the king with a gift, whereupon the king then gave permission for their traders to come ashore. Each trader then met up with one or another of the lesser kings and was escorted along with his merchandise to a village inland where he would purchase kola.³⁹ Once there, further rounds of feasting, gift giving, and socializing undoubtedly took place.

A rather less enthusiastic description comes from the French Huguenot (Calvinist) Jean Barbot, who wrote of his two brief voyages to the Guinea Coast in 1678–79 and 1681–82. His account of his time ashore in Senegal drew on conversations he had with employees of the French Compagnie du Sénégal and included a listing of the numerous dues and tolls that agents of the company had to pay when trading inland. These charges, which he attributed to the “black kings,” were a determining factor, in his view, of how profitable the trade would be. He or his informants estimated them to be about ten percent of the total value of the trade and specified that they were paid in goods. He also listed other payments to individuals such as local officials and suppliers of wood and water. Still other gifts or payments were due to individuals in each town or village. In the example he gave of the village of Camalingue, there were gifts to minor officials, to the king’s wife, to the valet and son of the town’s governor, to the chief interpreter and his valet, and to others. These charges, while individually small, added up to a significant amount and were considered by Barbot to be too time consuming and troublesome to dispense.⁴⁰

But even Barbot could warm to local kings on the Guinea Coast who, according to his judgment, behaved with good manners and propriety. Such was his impression of the elderly king of Sestos on the “Pepper Coast” (well to the south, in modern Liberia), where he visited for over a week during his second voyage.⁴¹ He provides a detailed description of his meeting and exchange of gifts with the king, an event that took place in a special circular building where Sestos officials met to discuss and settle trade agreements with foreign merchants and other strangers (see fig. 1.3). Among its interior furnishings was a small shrine where ritual offerings were made and where oaths were declared and witnessed. Barbot’s illustration of the meeting shows the king and his senior courtiers, all dressed in embroidered and flowing white cotton robes and seated on patterned mats. Barbot was careful to note the “grisgris,” or charms, gracing the king’s elaborate cap and necklaces. After a formal welcoming of the visitors came a ceremonial exchange of gifts. Barbot’s gift consisted of two long bars of “voyage iron,” a selection of glass beads, several iron knives, and two flasks of brandy. The king offered his guests provisions—two hens and a container of clean (hulled) rice—which Barbot’s men immediately prepared for the assembled to share.

FIGURE 1.3 King of Sestos receives Jean Barbot. John Barbot, “A Description of the Coasts of North and South-Guinea,” in A. and J. Churchill, A Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1732). Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

What Barbot was seeking from the king was not only an arrangement to buy ivory but also permission to cut wood and to replenish their water supplies. At the conclusion of their meeting, the king’s interpreter informed Barbot that he could expect a visit from the king very shortly. Over the course of his stay, Barbot managed to purchase a small amount of ivory along with stores of rice and about two hundred chickens. And his men, in addition to provisioning the ship with wood and water, took advantage of the fine fishing the river had to offer. Lacking Coelho’s extensive and decades-long experience on the Guinea Coast and perhaps revealing something of his own puritanical values, Barbot characterized Sestos in idyllic terms as a community that lived in peace, quiet, and modest abundance.⁴² A more experienced observer, however, would have been more circumspect. Considering the advanced age of the king, itself a portent of the approaching end to his reign, that peaceful time was likely to be soon interrupted by an unpredictable and possibly fractious interregnum period and in its wake any number of disruptive arguments or conflicts.

This chapter’s general overview reveals West Africa up to the eve of the Atlantic era as having been far from socially homogeneous or economically unified. West Africa was instead a land characterized by great social variety and dramatic differences in local economies and subsistence production. A long-standing history of trade with the equally foreign wider Islamic world had left its mark in a host of commercial institutions, relations, and practices that Africans adapted and Europeans accepted in the subsequent era of Euro-African maritime trade. Islam and the Arabic language bequeathed a core commonality of values and trust among Muslim merchants, enabling their commercial networks and markets to reach into many locales beyond the Islamic sphere. West Africa’s interlocking zones of trade, communication, and currency circulation cut across her many geographical, ecological, social, linguistic, and religious divides, thus forming a richly complex yet demonstrably viable commercial setting in which Europeans and Africans could develop their Guinea trade.

Europeans engaging in early modern trade on the Upper Guinea Coast had to navigate this complexity and adapt to a wide range of localized trading practices, markets, and values. They traded their goods in assortments that African traders wanted, and the process of coming to agreement on them was riddled with potential disagreements over specific matters of taste, quality, value, and price, all of which might change unpredictably over time and from place to place. Hence the social aspects of commerce—protocols, courtesies, favors, and gifts—carried great weight. To keep the flows of goods and currencies moving, European visitors had to show the proper deference and respect for their various West African trading partners and do so consistently and in the right ways. Merchants from Europe who wished to be successful learned that they had to prove themselves to be both well-informed and well-behaved—and therefore trustworthy—in Africans’ terms.