Water Systems, Trade, Economy & Regional Life

Pinasse On the River Niger Mali from Rolf Magener on Vimeo.


      What are the implications of water for the economy, trade and history of this region?
      As water is essential to human life, so too has life across the Middle Niger been fundamentally organized around the region’s powerful rivers, its lakes and streams and the digging of wells to tap sources underground. For a region so dramatically affected by the expansion of the Sahara desert over many centuries and the shifting, unpredictable patterns of rainfall, perhaps no issue has gone to the core concern of daily life and survival more than access to water. The region’s major bodies of water include the Niger, Senegal, and Gambia rivers, all of which begin in the Fouta Djallon highlands in today’s Guinea.

Fouta Djallon, Guineé Dec 31, 2008. Photo by "Manu" via picasa web albums.

Fouta Djallon, Guineé Dec 31, 2008. Photo by "Manu" via picasa web albums.

        One could cite many examples, and develop this theme of the link between water and trade in more directions than I can take time to do here now. But a few brief thumbnail points should indicate the range of issues involved. I present them in no particular order:

• Scholars have long debated the cause of the fall of ancient Ghana, the earliest polity from this part of Africa to appear in the historical record. One interpretation drawn from oral traditions suggests that the kingdom collapsed around the 11th century after a sustained period of drought led to the exhaustion of local water wells and the abandonment of its original site.
• Throughout the region the oldest, most enduring and widely practiced methods of food cultivation have been rainfed and floodplain agriculture. Accordingly, grains such as rice, millet, sorghum, fonio have been staples of the diet across this region for centuries, perhaps millenia. These subsistence crops were historically exchanged for salt, dates and other non-local products brought across the desert.
• The earliest inhabitants of the Upper Niger delta region, around Lake Debo and the ancient cities of Jenne and Dia, based their livelihood on fishing and rice cultivation, both activities dependent on the Niger river. 
• Between the 16th and 19th centuries, the city of Jenne was able to dominate the central Niger delta region because of its access to 500 km of navigable water between itself and Timbuktu to the north. In addition to supplying food to Timbuktu through canoe traffic, Jenne served as a major entrepot connecting regional trade in commodities such as gold, salt, slaves, cloth, and kola. (McIntosh, JAH, 1981)
• Further south, during roughly the same centuries, rivers were the primary means through which Europeans based along the coasts of Senegal, Gambia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, traded with the interior, exchanging various manufactured goods for captive human beings. Earlier in this period, the Portuguese, French and British also interposed themselves into existing riverine trade networks; for example, buying cloth at one end of the Gambia river and selling it at another.
• Rivers were also departure points for exploration. In 1827, René Caillié began his travel towards Timbuktu from the Rio Nunez on the coast of today’s Guinea, above Conakry. [My guess is the river is named for a Portuguese explorer/trader/pirate who traveled there centuries before Caillié]. 
• Bodies of water often constitute social and political boundaries between different ecological zones, human modes of production, religions, languages and/or cultural memories. For example, the Senegal river today marks the border between the modern nations of Mauritania and Senegal. But beginning in the 17th century, French traders distinguished between peoples living along the river’s left bank—Moors who traded in gum Arabic—and those on the right bank—Woloff, Futanke and others who were either agriculturalists or cattle raising pastoralists. The Senegal river was navigable by large boats only part of the year, which limited French ability to sail to the interior during this early period. Again, another historical example of the ways regional trade and settlement patterns have been shaped by the rhythms, patterns and flow of water.
• Even small streams may carry great meaning. Much historical and social meaning has been attributed to the Woyowoyanko, a small creek southwest of Bamako, that is said to have repeatedly been the site of major events over the centuries. Traditionally, the creek marks the boundary between the “Mande heartland” to the southwest and the Bamana region to the northeast. Woyowoyanko is also the site where, in 1898, Samory Toure, the jihadist and erstwhile builder of empire from Wassulu,  surrendered to the French, opening the era of French colonialism in the region.

Land and Topography

        Referred to variously as the Middle Niger Valley, the Inland Niger Delta and by other labels, the region I am studying lay inland from a enormous stretch of Atlantic coast from Senegal to Ghana. Its terrain morphs from open desert in the north across flat savannah woodlands to mountains and thick forests in the south. The geographical heart of the Middle Niger Valley lay within the present day borders of Mali but its influence reaches parts of as many as nine nations: Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Ghana. Outside West Africa, its historic connections to the Maghreb, across the desert, have been profound.
        The region's topographical diversity is but one of its attractions for me, as well as one of its significant challenges. I’m also intrigued by the multiple directional orientations possible from this inland “center” which, because of its location, has had trade access to such widely distinct regions. I’m interested in understanding the ways various people of the region oriented themselves across this space—ways that may not necessarily correspond to the simple north/south/east/west orientation of a casual map reader unfamiliar with the terrain.
       Ann Stahl succinctly describes the Inland Niger Delta as “a rich interior floodplain inserted into arid surroundings on the southern margins of the Sahara.” Archeologist Rod McIntosh, in Island of Gold, talks about a series of six “basins” or parts of this floodplain that have constituted the political, social, economic skeleton of the entire region over thousands of years. Its environment has supported pasturage (cattle, sheep, goats), agriculture (grains such as millet, fonio, rice; tubers and groundnuts), fishing and mining (iron and gold). Throughout the savannah, the soil is a red-colored laterite, which looks rocky and unyielding to my inexperienced eye. You can see what I mean in the photo posted above (more about that photo in later posts!). Notice the ground. But, however dry the laterite might appear, I have seen many fields of green stalks pushing from it, and even from the much drier looking sandy ground near Bandiagara in Dogon country!
        It was only this summer, while in Mali, that the regional significance of the river finally ‘clicked’ for me: all of the regions great “empires” include at least some territory along the banks of the Niger. It struck me that in all those very approximate maps in books/articles about the ancient empires of Ghana, Mali, Songhay, and of more recent ones such as Segu and Macina, the imperial territories appear as ambiguous gray shapes with uncertain borders—shapes that always overlap with the Niger. The waterway as a corridor of power, an inescapable element in any would be ruler’s toolkit. For years, my haphazard reading about aspects early West Africa had circled around this rather pedestrian observation without it ever developing into a full-fledged “a-ha” moment. Until now.