Istwa Nou

Drier conditions in the later seventh and sixth millennia BCE moved the advantage away from the communities living off the Saharan waterways and toward Nilo-Saharan speakers who had built their living on dry land. Through the proto-Northern Sudanic, proto-Saharo-Sahelian and proto-Sahelian periods of the eighth and seventh millennia, those peoples of the southern and eastern Sahara began by protecting cattle and by the close of the seventh millennium were herding cattle outright, along with the sheep and goats that had recently arrived. They had started as collectors of wild grain. By the later eighth millennium the vocabulary they left behind, and the granaries archaeologists find, indicate they were cultivating sorghum and probably pearl millet as well. Nobody here was waiting for the climate to decide. What emerged was an economy pairing herds with grain that would carry across the whole Sahel within two millennia, and the pastoral societies of Sudan and the Fulani of West Africa descend from it.

In the sixth millennium BCE the descendants of the Nilo-Saharan communities that had put together an economy of cattle herding and grain farming moved west with it. They crossed the Sahel and the southern Sahara, reaching the Hoggar range in what is now southern Algeria and the great bend of the Niger. That is a run of more than three thousand kilometres inside a thousand years. The older way of life, built on fishing and the resources of standing water, held on wherever waterways survived and lost ground everywhere else as the wet Sahara dried. What moved with the herds was more than an economy. Languages moved, matrilineal kinship arrangements moved, and the ceramic traditions that would later flow east and north into the Middle Nile went along too. The Sahel belt, a strip of semi-arid grassland running the whole width of the continent, became a corridor. The states of the western Sudan were built later on the population base laid down in that thousand years.