Istwa Nou

Peter Schmidt's excavations in the Great Lakes region of Africa found furnaces that reached temperatures high enough to bring carbon steel straight out of the smelt, and they were doing it by the close of the first millennium BCE. Steel in a single step is a hard thing. Europe managed it in the nineteenth century with the Bessemer converter, two thousand years later. Chinese smelters had the capability by the eleventh century CE, well after the African furnaces. The quality gap lasted. When European iron began arriving on the West African coast in the fifteenth century and after, African smiths kept using metal from their own smelters for real tools. The Portuguese, who controlled the coastal trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bought iron from producers in present day Sierra Leone and Liberia and carried it up the coast to Guinea and Senegal, where they exchanged it for gold, for leather, and for people. The men selling technological superiority were shipping African iron because it beat what they had at home.