Istwa Nou

Long-distance exchange systems emerged in several parts of the ancient world out of different social arrangements, and the differences show in what each one built. Across the western and central Sudan the revolution produced commercial towns and classes of merchants and artisans with no centralising state above them. In the Congo basin it ran on river networks and on societies whose membership crossed political lines. Around the Mediterranean it produced maritime commerce and coined money. The common features are easy to list: professional traders, production aimed at exchange, towns growing at the junctions, and institutions to keep goods moving across other people's territory. The problem was the same everywhere, which is how to move goods reliably over distances no single community controls. Each answer carried the marks of the people who worked it out. Studying one of them alone loses the pattern, and studying the pattern without Africa gets it wrong.

Trade across the eastern half of the Congo basin ran on an institution usually translated as secret societies. Their members were the merchants who moved the goods, together with leading figures from the chiefdoms and small kingdoms the routes passed through. Women could belong as well as men. The societies stretched from the Lomami River east to Lake Tanganyika. Secret here meant roughly what it means among Masons: ranks a member advanced through, rituals marking each advancement, and observances reserved for those who had reached a given standing. The practical effect was security. A merchant travelling with cargo could call on hospitality and protection in each district he entered, because in every district there were members of his own society or of one allied to it. Goods therefore crossed a patchwork of independent polities, including polities at odds with each other. With no single state anywhere in the region, this was the machinery that made distance trade possible, and it was made of obligation.