Istwa Nou

The commercial system of the western and central Sudan rested on two older developments. The first was full agriculture. Farming produces far more food from the same land than foraging does, which allowed populations to grow, and it created a trade of its own once concentrated town populations had to be fed by farmers who lived elsewhere. The second was technology. Ceramics, the loom weaving of cotton and metallurgy were all in place well before this period, and they gave townspeople something to manufacture and sell. Transport completed it. The donkey was brought west by speakers of Chadic languages and was probably an established pack animal across the southern Sahara before the fifth millennium BCE was out. Donkeys became the main overland carriers of the trade in the two millennia that followed, while boats moved goods along the Niger. Every part of this belongs to Africa: the crops, the ceramics, the looms, the furnaces, the animal, the river and the merchants who used them.

Before the second millennium BCE was out, the trading regions of West Africa began to link up: Tichit, the inland delta of the Niger, and the Air massif. Across the Sahel of present-day Mali a new kind of town grew out of clusters of manufacturing villages. One ward held families weaving cotton cloth for sale, cotton weaving having been established in West Africa by the end of that millennium. Another held leather workers, another professional potters. When iron reached this far west during the first millennium BCE, each town added a ward of smiths. The fifth group were merchants, who carried the town's output to distant buyers and financed its carriage. Dia, on the western side of the inland Niger delta, dates from the close of the second millennium BCE. Houlouf on Lake Chad grew into a polity and a junction. Archaeologists have located several hundred probable town sites along nearly two thousand kilometres of the western and central Sudan belt.