Introduction
In 1985 there were approximately 130 million Muslims (or roughly one-sixth of the total world Muslim population) living in Africa between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. They are mainly concentrated in the Sahelian and Sudanic (or savannah) belts lying to the immediate south of the true Sahara and between the Atlantic and the Red Sea and in the Horn of Africa and along the East African coast down to northern Mozambique.
A little over half of this number live in West Africa, with one country alone—Nigeria— accounting for about one-third of the sub-Saharan African total (estimated 43 million). The Nilotic Sudan accounts for a further 14.5 million, or 73 per cent of the total population of the Republic of the Sudan, 13 million or 40 per cent ofEthiopia’s population (including Eritrea) is Muslim, while some 18 million live in the Hom and East Africa.Sub-Saharan Africa’s contact with Islam goes back, on its fringes, for some twelve centuries when seafaring merchants from southern Arabia and the Gulf began to trade on the coasts of what are modem Somalia and northern Kenya, and North African merchants first crossed the Sahara to make contact with populations along the banks of the Rivers Senegal and Niger and in the area to the north of Lake Chad. Since then Islam’s progress has, even if slow, been steady and though in the twentieth century it has had to face the challenge of Christianity allied with imperialism, it has continued to attract Africans looking for a ‘universalist’ faith in a world where local and ethnic loyalties have been giving way to outlooks that are increasingly national and international. This brief essay will attempt to chart the dissemination of the faith in tropical Africa and to note some of its more significant historical manifestations in the pre-colonial period. In particular, emphasis will be placed upon the agents of Islamisation, regional traditions of Islamic learning and orthopraxy and the interplay of faith and politics in African kingdoms.