Istwa Nou

The Aïr mountains sit at the southern edge of the Sahara in what is now Niger, twelve hundred kilometres east of the inland delta of the Niger. Between roughly 2500 and 1500 BCE the people living there worked out copper smelting, and once the industry was running Aïr became the supplier of copper across the central and western Sudan belt. Urban development in the massif itself may have come later. Something else came early. In five separate parts of Aïr, people began building megalithic burial sites. The archaeologist Augustin Holl proposes that these mark five small polities in the centuries between 1500 and 1000 BCE, each holding a share of the copper bearing ground. Monumental construction, political authority and control of a metal that everyone downstream needed, all present in the middle of the desert at a date when the standard narrative has nothing at all to say about the region. The routes running out from those mines became the arteries of West African trade.

Susan and Roderick McIntosh, excavating in the inland delta of the Niger, found exchange running in every direction among the specialist communities of the delta, and between them and the farming populations of the Sahel and savanna around it, and running that way well before 2000 BCE. Sorghum had come west from the eastern Sudan belt by then and joined pearl millet, fonio and livestock in the fields and herds of those communities. The delta held several economies at once, each suited to a different piece of ground and each producing a surplus the others wanted, which made the exchange structural rather than occasional. Towns grew out of that arrangement from below. No commanding centre organised it and no state was required to make it work. Every model of urbanisation that treats a centralising state as the precondition has to account for a place where commerce arrived first and kings arrived afterward.