Istwa Nou

By the first three centuries CE, traders on the trans-Saharan routes were carrying a new commodity north: gold from the mines and river deposits of West Africa. It changed the standing of Africa in world economic history. In later centuries the same metal backed the dinar of the Islamic world and the florin of Renaissance Italy, which means monetary systems in places whose people never saw a West African miner rested on West African labour. The other consequence was currency itself. As trade grew in scale and complexity, regions began producing their first coinages, tokens carrying value separately from any particular commodity being exchanged. Money is a repeated answer to a shared problem, and Africa's commercial networks arrived at it as independently as anyone else did. Gold moving north across the desert is also the start of a pattern that runs through this whole timeline, in which African production ends up denominated in somebody else's accounts.