Istwa Nou

The second great region of the early West African commercial revolution lay in and around the inland delta of the Niger, where the river spreads into channels across a wide basin. The delta packs several different environments into a small compass, and the communities living there specialised accordingly. Along the bayous were people who lived by fishing. On the dry ground between the channels were growers of African rice. For hundreds of kilometres around the delta, farmers raised pearl millet, fonio and other grains without irrigation. None of these communities could produce everything it needed where it stood, and each could produce a surplus of one thing that its neighbours wanted. Fish for grain, rice for millet, one specialised product for another. Out of that arrangement came routes, standing relationships, middlemen and markets. No state organised any of it. The trade arose from the ground conditions, and it was running centuries before any political authority in the region was in a position to tax it.

The best studied centre of early West African production lies in the Tichit region of southern Mauritania, near the Malian border and five hundred kilometres west northwest of the inland delta of the Niger. Between 1800 and 1200 BCE a line of towns grew up there, one of them noticeably larger and near the middle of the cluster. Families of skilled craftsmen in each town made goods for sale, and the towns divided the work between them. One turned out arrowheads. Another made grindstones. A third produced beads of carnelian. Their trade reached hundreds of kilometres east and west, far past the neighbours. These were towns with differentiated craft economies and interregional commerce, operating at a moment when the Phoenicians were only beginning to establish themselves in the Mediterranean. The stone ruins are still standing in the Mauritanian desert. Whatever a textbook says about when African urban life began, the foundations are lying there in the sand to be measured.