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.