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.