Copper on the lower Congo pays for the founding of a kingdom

North of the Congo river, a short way inland from the Atlantic, smiths worked out copper metallurgy for themselves. The date is not fixed, though it falls centuries after iron was already being smelted in the region, which is the ordinary African sequence and the reverse of the European one. Control of the trade in that copper became one of the foundations on which the Kingdom of Kongo was built and rose to power during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Ehret draws the line from the metal to the state. A commodity people want, held by those who know how to produce it, converts into revenue, and revenue into the ability to hold territory and command loyalty. Kongo was not assembled out of nothing by accident. It was assembled by people with a technology of their own making and the leverage it gave them. The Portuguese reached the mouth of that river in 1483 and found a kingdom whose wealth had been made before they knew it existed.

Portuguese speakers built their sorcery vocabulary out of a Latin root meaning manufactured or artificial. A feitico was a made thing, a charm or a spell, and feiticaria was the practice of making them. The earliest surviving records of both words are legal, in anti sorcery legislation of 1385 and 1403. The root carries two ideas at once. One is doubt over whether the thing is real or only constructed to deceive. The other is seduction, the swaying of another person against their will. In the late middle ages Portuguese speakers made protective charms from broken mirrors and pieces of hangman's rope. Three centuries afterwards, in Bahia, the same word was applied to objects and illnesses that Africans described in entirely different terms, and the Lisbon Inquisition tried people for feiticaria on the strength of it. Colonial officials used feitico and veneno almost interchangeably, which is how an illness became a poisoning.

Through the fifteenth century Portuguese and Spanish builders produced ships made for the open ocean, and their navigators learned to use the compass and to read the Atlantic's currents and prevailing winds well enough to sail out and get home again. That combination opened the Atlantic islands. Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde were reached and settled. Italian merchants, who had financed and run sugar around the Mediterranean for generations, worked with the Iberian colonisers to establish the crop on those islands, grown by enslaved people. The plantation of the Americas was assembled there first, in miniature and offshore. The ships did something else as well. Until then the winds and the distances had kept the Western Hemisphere out of contact with Africa and Eurasia. Once the route was solved that barrier was gone for good, and everything that followed for the people of the Caribbean followed from a set of technical problems being solved in Lisbon and in Seville.

Kankan Moussa ruled Mali from 1297 to 1332 and made his name on the road to Mecca. He met men of learning at the holy places and attached them to his service. Among them were es Sahali, a poet of Arab and Spanish formation, and the historian El Mamer. He carried both back to the Sudan and used them in the administration of his empire, and under their direction the two mosques of Timbuktu and of Gao were raised, Gao being then attached to Mali. The Arab geographer Ibn Battuta left a close description of the customs and ceremonial of the Malian court: the luxury the emperors displayed, the order and regularity of the administrative services, the observance of Koranic rule. Taken together the accounts describe a state with revenue, protocol, architecture and a documented court, at the same moment when Europe was assembling its own. Mali lay south of the Mossi country, on the plateau above the forest.