1000 BCE to 1000 CE · Africanspan
The horse turned West African distance from a barrier into a road
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From the first millennium BCE horses spread almost everywhere the climate would carry them, reaching as far south in Africa as the highlands of Ethiopia and the open grassland of the Sudan belt. A horse moves people, equipment and messages at a speed that changes what a government can do. Campaigns reach further, and orders arrive while they still matter. Horses came into West Africa along trade routes that already crossed the Sahara, carried from Carthage into the western Sudan belt by the middle of the first millennium BCE. At first the wealthy kept them for prestige. During the later first millennium CE they became the basis of cavalry in the emerging Sudanic states, Wagadu above all, the power later known as Ghana. Hundreds of kilometres of open grassland between the Niger bend and the Atlantic had been an obstacle to holding territory together. Mounted men made the same ground a corridor, and Wagadu, Mali, Songhay and Kanem-Bornu were built across it.
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