The Question of Empire in Sub-Saharan Africa
One model of large-scale state formation in Africa is associated with the work of Jack Goody, who emphasized the predatory quality of many large-scale African polities. Goody argued that the levels of agricultural productivity in most of SubSaharan Africa did not rise as a consequence of state protection or organization (i.e., irrigation), and as such, state formation played little positive role in expanding economic output.
Instead, Goody argued that the power of African states is better understood in terms of what he called the “means of destruction.”[1666] Others have followed Goody in understanding the emergence of large-scale states in Sudanic and Sahelian West Africa as a product of coercion and an ability to extract economically valuable resources from subject populations and neighboring peoples subject to their raids.[1667] The Songhay Empire, as it appears in the seventeenth-century chronicle, would seem to fit this model quite well. On the one hand, in the empire's heartland, farmers, and herders used the floodplain of the Niger River in time-honored ways that produced some level of surplus of staples, without significant state investment in productive infrastructure. On the other hand, the empire carried out annual dry-season military campaigns in neighboring areas that demonstrated or expanded Songhay power, but also produced booty and tribute in goods and enslaved people.It is difficult to know how much stock to put in descriptions of the coercive power of the Songhay state found in the chronicles. Clearly armies could be mustered for regular raiding, and the core Niger Bend populations were kept under some form of authority. The Ta'rikh al-Sudan gives names of some of the provincial, military, and administrative titles held by state officials in the empire. For example, it refers to the hii-koy, as the leader who controlled boats on the Niger River that could be put in the service of the state; the kumina-farma, as the governor of the western parts of the empire; and the fari-mondyo, as either the overseer of agricultural taxes or possibly of royal estates.[1668] But instead of indicating a structured bureaucracy of some kind, most of these titles refer to the ruler of a particular town or province, or to a function (Timbuktu-koi is the ruler of Timbuktu, whereas goima-koi is the harbor master of Gao).
This suggests a less centralized—and less coercively powerful—state than has usually been described by historians. We might benefit from thinking about the Songhay Empire less in terms of its coercive, “hard” power, and more in terms of what Africanist archaeologists and political anthropologists have identified as the ritual quality of political authority in many African states.[1669] A similar interpretive model would also help us better understand Songhay’s predecessor states such as Ancient Ghana and Ancient Mali.An earlier generation of political anthropologists in Africa developed a model of large-scale state formation as a process of more or less voluntary submission to a symbolically powerful center. Aiden Southall, for example, argued that peripheral groups attached themselves to the Alur state that he studied in the region of Lake Albert along the border of modern Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo because it offered them access to valuable forms of ritual or “religious capital,” which were associated with shared ideas of sacral kingship and rain-making. Southall coined the term “segmentary state” to describe this kind of polity “in which the spheres of ritual suzerainty and political sovereignty do not coincide. The former extends widely towards a flexible, changing periphery. The latter is confined to the central, core domain.”[1670]
The ability of the early Sudanic and Sahelian states such as Kanem-Bornu, Ancient Ghana, Ancient Mali, and Songhay to control—or benefit from—long- distance trade has long been recognized as an important feature of their emergence and success, although current archaeological interpretation suggests that state formation preceded the development of regular trans-Saharan trade.[1671] According to David Edwards, large-scale state formation in classical Nubia involved longdistance trade in prestige items, in the form of “embassy trade” between states, rather than market mechanisms, which only developed much later.[1672] For example the Nubian state of Meroe, which came into existence in the early millennium bce and ended in the fourth century ce, projected its power outside of its core area by an ability to distribute imported prestige goods to regional elites, who in turn depended on their connection with Meroe to mark their status.
Archaeological evidence of imported prestige items such as jewelry, metal goods, lamps, faience, and wine and oil residues have been found in the orbit of Meroe, suggesting that redistribution to regional elites was an important mechanism for the projection of Meroe’s symbolic authority.[1673]Recent archeological work at Saharan trade sites important to the Songhay Empire indicates that, contrary to most assumptions, high-value trade goods were being sent south across the Sahara to West Africa and presumably distributed among elites. For example, Sam Nixon found a Qingbai Chinese porcelain pot and remnants of silk textiles at Essouk in northern Mali, an important staging site on the Saharan trade to the Niger Bend.16 The extent to which large states like the Songhay Empire functioned in these ways, projecting symbolic authority and distributing prestige trade goods to neighboring smaller-scale polities, even as the region had been articulated into international Muslim trade networks, needs further empirical investigation. But at the very least, this model reorients our understanding of the Songhay Empire along more Africanist lines, in accordance with what we know about other large-scale African polities. Established relationships with Muslim traders provided African rulers with access to wealth finance from parts of the world otherwise inaccessible. Early evidence of this in the Niger Bend is the marble tombstones that were imported from Muslim Spain to Gao in the twelfth century.17
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