Western Sudan's Elite Equestrian Violence

The savannah of the great African river valleys of western Sudan gave rise to a series of large empires possibly starting from as early as the third or fourth centuries. The first was the empire of Wagadu (popularly known as Ghana after the title of its warrior king), which rose to great power by taxing the trade of salt from the Sahara Desert and gold from the south, which was traded across the Sahara into northern Africa and beyond.

When Europeans made a number of trial raids on mainland coastal populations in the 1450s, they were repeatedly defeated by the naval forces of Mali's coastal states. As a result, the bulk of western Sudan remained focused, in the centuries that followed, on overland trade routes to the north. The sixteenth century witnessed the gradual eclipse of Mali, with its con­tinued control over gold mines, by Songhay, the largest and last of the great savannah empires, which began around the bend of the Niger and spread north well into the desert to directly control the salt mines of Taghaza, which provided most of the salt to West Africa.

According to John Iliffe, honour was the primary ideological motivation of African behaviour until the arrival of world religions. Elites of the savannah competed for honour in dress, etiquette, social standing and equestrian skill, but the highest distinction came through mounted ritual violence in civilian duels or on the battlefield.

Archers had ridden small ponies on the savannah since the first millennium, but large warhorses arrived in the region by the thirteenth century and this in turn transformed aristocratic male culture. Elites contended in their mainte­nance and training of these expensive horses. They competed in demonstra­tions of equestrian skills from the backs of their galloping steeds, such as retrieving weapons from the ground or reaching back with their shields to erase their mount's hoof prints. But above all, aristocrats trained from youth with the sword and azagaya (an African short spear for throwing as well as thrusting use) to attain honour through valiant performances during close combat, in private duels and national wars. Savannah horsemen and their steeds were protected by quilted leather or chain-mail armour, but defensive agility with a leather shield was a warrior's primary defence. Mounted aristo­crats could achieve virtuosity in shield work, as illustrated by the story of the cavalry captain Emmanuel, who during a revolt ‘having been for some time surrounded by many men, who shot arrows at him like hail, he preserved himself by this dexterity in managing his shield'.^[864] Cavalrymen, who spent years honing their skills with blade, azagaya and shield through ritualised contests, looked down upon the peasant infantries who practised the less demanding tactic of firing arrows. Such infantry archers nonetheless remained the core of Mali and Songhay's armies, but in the few examples in which they did play a decisive role in breaking the enemy, it reflected on the armies' ruler as cowardice. Thus the officers that commanded them were circumscribed by a military culture which emphasised cavalry heroics.

For savannah elites, mounted warfare with their counterparts, even from rival kingdoms or empires, was akin to a dangerous sport governed by a code of honour that often trumped military objectives. A visitor to Mali recounted that the Malian emperor rewarded such heroics with varying sizes of gold anklets and wide trousers according to the number of a warrior's exploits.^[865] Championship combat between principal fighters was not unusual, as during the 1588 Songhay civil war when the rebel Balma'a and Kurmina-fari engaged in single combat on horseback with azagayas, in which Kurima-fari eventually bested his rival with an impressive throw.^[866] The temerity of the commanders who unhesitatingly led their men against overwhelming odds were praised by the griots (storytellers or historians) of the savannah, who retold feats of bravery for future generations. Even rival horsemen often respected such bravery. Timbuktu chronicles report that when fifteen of twenty-four Songhay horsemen were killed in a fierce battle against 400 cavalrymen from Katsina in 1553, the victors tended to the wounds of the survivors and ‘looked after them most solicitously, then set them free and sent them back to [the Songhay emperor], saying that such valorous folk did not deserve to die'.^[867]

This honour-driven ritualistic violence - similar to the ideals for European knights - clashed with rival transnational forms of military violence when the Sultan of Morocco sent an army with firearms and European-style tactics into the savannah in 1591. At the Battle of Tondibi, some 4,000 Moroccan troops armed mostly with muskets defeated a much larger army from Songhay. These Moroccan troops, known locally as ‘arma.’, or ‘shooters', colonised the Niger bend and maintained a virtual monopoly on firearms for some time. Although this led to the rapid collapse of Songhay, prestige-driven notions of equestrian honour would continue for centuries among many of the smaller successor kingdoms (such as Segu) that arose in Songhay's wake. None would attain the size and power of Mali or Songhay. The role of close combat on the battlefield would only gradually be worn away by both the availability of firearms and the elites' gradual adoption ofless syncretic forms of Islam, which undermined the seeking of combat that fuelled knightly pursuits. Yet while bullets made demonstrations of heroic prowess with shields less practical on the battlefield, such combative virtuosity continued to have an outlet in the combat sports and cultural rituals of the savannah.