Why There? Historical Geographies of West Africa

01. Prior Knowledge
02. Student Objectives
03. Organizing Ideas
04. Teacher Context
05. Teacher Tips
06. Student Context
07. Key Questions
08. Activities & Sources

01

Prior Knowledge

Prior understanding of the role of human activity in relation to geography would be beneficial. Specifically, useful prior knowledge would be how humans interact and draw from their geographies in order to understand an interactional understanding of humans and their geographies, one shaping another.

Specifically, knowledge or resources to support students in their understanding include:

Knowledge of the existence of the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai
Though introduced in the student context, if prior knowledge does not yet exist. A basic understanding of the geography of Africa and its main eco-regions (savannah, sahel, desert, plateau, etc.) would be beneficial.

You may want to consider prior to teaching this lesson: The Gold Road

You may want to consider after teaching this lesson: A Story of Great Cities Memory and Knowledge: The Story of Sundiata Keita West African Objects & Artifacts

02

Student Objectives

Identify key geographic features of West Africa
Discuss how key geographic features supported people and their ability to build kingdoms in the region.
Discuss how geography enabled African kingdoms to be central in the global medieval world

03

Organizing Idea

People in West Africa during medieval times engaged with their geographies in fundamental ways to extract resources, to grow food, and to establish and maintain connections with North Africa and beyond. In particular, the Niger river, which cuts across three eco-regions of the Sahel, Sahara and Savanna, was essential for people’s sourcing of gold, the development of cities, and the growing of food and sustenance of livestock. This led to the interconnectedness of people living in the empires as well as the empires with the rest of the world. Geography supported Africa’s central place in the global medieval world as it linked West Africa with the Mediterranean and Arabian regions.

04

Teacher Context

When we teach about historical events, there is an over-emphasis on chronology without strong enough consideration given to physical space, context, and geography. What we want our students to be able to understand are the interactions of place, time, and culture, so that they are able to answer not only the question “where do events happen?” but “why there?”

So why did the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai thrive “there” in West Africa?

Several geographical features matter to understanding this history. You can find them on The Gold Road interactive map, where wvery landscape item featured ois intentionally chosen because it represents an important aspect of the physical context for the kingdoms and the sourcing of gold. In particular, you will find:

The Sahara: The Sahara means “desert” in Arabic and contrary to popular belief about its sandy emptiness, it is home to approximately three million people. It is made up of many types of environments that include rocks, resilient shrubs and grasses, sand dunes, acacia trees; date trees, salt cedar trees which grow in dry riverbeds, oases with water springs which in turn allow for towns to develop. In the high mountains of Ahaggar and Aïr, there sometimes can be snow and olive, cypress, and fig trees grow there (Becker, Caravans of Gold, 94). The Sahara Desert covers 3.3 million square miles, an area about the size of the United States. Although it is extremely dry, receiving less than 3 inches of rainfall a year, it was a much wetter region from 10,000 BCE to 5,000 years ago. This is why Sahara rock art of Southern Algeria drawn in the period of the wet Sahara shows aquatic creatures, hippos, giraffes and other wildlife that would necessitate reliable water supply. This is also why the now dry Sahara is a source of salt deposits. Around 5,000 BCE, the Sahara saw decreased precipitation and by the year 300 BCE stabilized into the dry Sahara we know today. Climate change is still ongoing and the Sahara is becoming larger moving further North and South.
The Sahel, in contrast, is wetter. It is a transition zone to the North of the Sahara and to the South and is visible on satellite maps (e.g. Google) as a band of land, between the yellow-brown Sahara and the green Savanna. In Arabic, Sahel means shore or beach. With this metaphor, the Sahara is the ocean and the bordering Sahel zones are its shores.The Sahel is a semi-dry zone where it rains four months out of the year. Shrubs, baobab trees, and acacia grow there and feed sheep, cattle, goats, and camels and crops like millet and sorghum. Low levels of rainfall means that the Tsetse fly, which decimates ruminants further South, does not thrive there. The Sahel is the key zone where the three empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai prospered. See the map of the Sahel here: https://www.oecd.org/swac/maps/maps-atlasofthesahara-sahel.htm
The Niger River is the 3rd longest river in Africa. It starts in the mountains of the Futa Jallon in Guinea, flowing northward toward the Sahel, bending East to return to a Southward flow after Gao (modern day Mali) and ending in the Atlantic, in Nigeria. The river floods yearly, especially around the Niger River Bend, when the river reaches and passes Timbuktu, a flat plain area where the river slows down. As David Conrad expresses, “[t]his great turn in the river, which continues to where it flows into modern-day Nigeria, is called the Niger Bend. The Niger Bend area of the Middle Niger, which includes the vast Inland Delta, was the heartland of the Songhay Empire. It was such a desirable region that neighboring peoples would periodically try to take control of the area, and this kept the armies of Songhay busy main- taining their control” (Conrad, 9). The Niger river is important for many reasons: the river provided transportation and connected places across a large geographic area. Similar to the Nile, the yearly flooding creates fertile land to grow food. Crucial to the medieval economy of the region is that the region of the Niger’s headwaters had rich deposits of alluvial gold. The river allowed for the rise of urban centers from the fourth century, especially along the inland delta with towns such as Jenne-Jeno, Timbuktu, and Gao.
The Niger River headwaters & the Savanna: The headwaters are the source of the great Niger river, located in the Savanna. Through mountains of the Futa Jallon, large amounts of water are carried to the Niger River Bend. There, the water slows to form an Inland Delta, a network of river braids visible from Sattelite. In the headwaters area are Buré and Bambuk, two places where alluvial gold was sourced. In the Savanna, people sourced livestock, iron tools, weapons, and utensils, leather from animal hides, textiles, clay pottery, grass products, medicinal herbs, kola nuts and food such as fish, rice, spices, honey, and fruit (Conrad, 05).
The Niger River Inland Delta-The Inland Delta is the point where the water that comes from the headwaters slows down because the terrain is flat. At this point, the river forms a network of braids. The Inland Delta brings water all the way into the Sahara, to Timbuktu and Gao. The river floods yearly in this area which allow for the growing of rice, sorghum, and millet. The delta also brings water to Timbuktu.

Oases were crucial stopping points in the trans-Saharan trade because they provided sources of freshwater and fertile areas that support the growth of palm trees, date trees. Since the Sahara was previously greener, underground water sources which are called aquifers provide water to most oases. There are about 90 oases in the Sahara. In some of them, the water is readily accessible because it rises to the surface. In other oases, humans have dug wells to access the water. Some of the famous oases that allowed for caravans to stop and replenish were: Tafialt, Ouargla, and Tuat. People have historically protected their oases by planting trees around the perimeter to keep the sands from ruining crops and water sources. Oases were strategic places. “Merchants and traders who travel along these routes must stop at oases to replenish food and water supplies. This means that whoever controls an oasis also controls the trade along the route—making oases desirable to political, economic, and military leaders” (Retrieved from https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/oasis/).

References & Further Resources

Badawi, Z. Desert Empires in the BBC African History Series [Episode 10] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shEU4PQUxxA&list=PLajyiGz4JeyPq2lpEt2skZRhQsAspIQCp&index=11&t=38s on 12/5/2023

Berzock. K. B. (2019). Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa. Princeton University Press.

Boston University African Studies Center (2020).

Google Earth Presentation: The Geography of West Africa, Geo-Spatial Inquiries through a Historical Lens https://www.bu.edu/africa/files/2022/10/Instructions-for-the-Geography-of-West-Africa_-Geo-Spatial-Inquiries-through-a-historical-lens.pdf

Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time. Block Museum of Art “Teachers’ Guide.“ . Northwestern University Retrieved from https://caravansofgold.org/resources/further-resources/ on 9/6/2022.

Conrad, D. (2005) Empires of Medieval West Africa: Ghana, Mali, Songhai.

Gold Road Lessons: Oases and the Gold Road. Retrieved from https://cfas.howard.edu/gold-road/teaching-resources on 12/5/2023.

French, H. W. (2021). Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the making of the modern world, 1471 to the Second World War. New York: Liveright Publishing Company.

National Geographic Encyclopedic entry: Oasis. Retrieved from https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/oasis/ on 12/5/2023.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Sahel and West Africa. Map of the Geographic Sahel: https://www.oecd.org/swac/maps/maps-atlasofthesahara-sahel.htm

Gomez, M. (2018). African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa. Princeton University Press.

The Gold Road. Howard University Center for African Studies. Retrieved from http://thegoldroad.org/map.aspx

05

Teacher Tips

Prior understanding of how humans act in interaction with specific geographies is important for students to understand. It is also important to focus on not teaching geography as a unidirectional influence on human activity (e.g. how does geography shape human activity) but rather promote an interactional understanding of humans and their geographies, one shaping another.

As students are making connections between places and the cultural/economic activities therein, explicitly name student learning as the ability to make connections between place and society, between physical spaces and cultures both in the past and present day. In addition, be mindful of the language that is used as you engage with these activities and new understandings. Avoid the words “discovering” and “exploring” in relation to Africa because of the colonial history of these words and focus rather on engaging or visiting as you move through the virtual landscape.

It is important that even as students learn about and enjoy exploring the Gold Road, that there is a connection made to how European quests for gold would later transform into incursions to enslave people. From this quest, a new era in world history would begin: the racial capitalist economy.

The Gold Road Interactive Map:

All of the core aspects of the history of the Gold Road and the landscapes of the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, can be found on an interactive online map called The Gold Road (http://thegoldroad.org/map.aspx#) around which this unit is based.

The Gold Road is a library of detailed content for independent or scaffolded student inquiry and research. It allows students to explore and make connections in one time period’s people, places, trade items, buildings and routes, or across several time periods. Students can also choose a more focused inquiry on a specific item, a place, or a person and their significance. Thus a student can trace the linkages between people, items, places, routes, and significant buildings or focus on one aspect of this history. A student can make meaning linking micro aspects of this history (e.g. a person or a building) with macro aspects (the role it/they/he/she played in the whole kingdom).

It is strongly recommended that you test out and explore how the map works on your own before launching any activity that uses the map. In this way, you can help answer any technical questions about how to retrieve information and how the layers and markers work before students are tasked with an inquiry.

Detailed instructions and student handouts on How to use The Gold Road map and some of its features are available through the Digital Toolkit.

Teachers may modify and adapt these instructions as they introduce the map and activities to students throughout the unit.

06

Student Context

When we think of the desert we often think of a vast and empty expanse of dry or arid land. You might therefore be surprised to learn that the Sahara Desert is not full of empty sand dunes. The Sahara actually spans a vast territory from North to West Africa and stretches toward the East. Therefore rather than being a barrier for people living in Africa thousands of years ago, it actually served as a connection point.

If you were to look at a pictorial map at that time, you would see that the Sahara was full of oases. An oasis is a fertile area in a desert, typically characterized by the presence of water in the form of springs or wells. Oases were and are vital for human habitation and agriculture in arid environments, providing a source of water for drinking, irrigation, and the cultivation of crops. Oases also served as important stopover points for travelers crossing deserts, providing a respite from the harsh desert conditions and a source of refreshment.

Zooming in on the map would reveal that the area south of the Sahara is called the Sahel which means “Shore” in Arabic. Why do you think it is called “shore”? If the Sahel is a shore, what would be the ocean? The Sahel had very specific geographical features that also allowed people to thrive. As a result, despite its harsh environment, the Sahel was and is home to people who have adapted to its conditions. Even further South is the Savanna, an area rich in resources as well. Savannas are dominated by grasses, trees, and shrubs, which typically form a continuous ground cover. Unlike forests, which have dense tree canopies, savannas have widely spaced trees and shrubs.

The Sahel, the Savanna and oases in the Sahara, all had features and natural resources that enabled people to uniquely travel and exchange goods and ideas. Exploring the land and its features helps us better understand how out of the vast continent of Africa this region enabled the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai to thrive.

07

Key Questions

01.

What about the specific West African locations, landscapes, and climates allowed humans to thrive there over thousands of years?

02.

How did West Africans during the time of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai engage with their geographies?

03.

What aspects of the geography of West Africa were important for the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai and why were they important? Why did the empires thrive in this geography specifically?