West African Kingdoms in the Nineteenth Century by Daryll Forde, P. M. Kaberry

About this book

This collection of studies brings together in a single volume some of the results of the considerable body of recent research on the later development and organization of the larger states which played so great a p art in the earlier economic, political, and cultural life of West Africa. We hope it will be useful to a wide range of readers. Powerful kingdoms with complex political organization and elaborate state ritual had early developed in the w ide region that lay between the Western Sahara and the Guinea Coast. Some were among the earliest societies of Tropical Africa to become know n to the Mediterranean and Western World. They w ere also the first with which enduring external relations w ere established. F rom the tenth century onwards, Arabic-speaking merchants and Islamic proselytizers regularly crossed the Sahara in caravans to the courts and cities of Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and Kanem, and celebrated journeys w ere also made to North Africa and Mecca by some of the rulers of these states. Accounts of them in the writings of Arab travellers and geographers filtered through to Mediterranean Europe. From the late fifteenth century, when the Portuguese established their first trading stations on the Gold Coast and in the Bight of Benin, fragmentary knowledge of other kingdom s lying in the forest and savannah hinterlands of the Guinea Coast began to flow directly to Christian Europe. Over the next centuries, as the slave trade built up to considerable dimensions, some accounts were published not only of the trade b u t of some of the kingdoms involved in it. W e have such classics as the works of Pereira (1505-20), Dapper (1668), John Barbot (1732), Clapperton (1829), and R. and J. Lander (1832) relating to w hat was later to be Nigeria; of Bosman (1704), Snelgrave (1734), W . Smith (1744), N orris (1790), Dalzel (1793), and M ’Leod (1820) for w hat is now Dahomey; of Bowdich (1819), Hutto n (1821), Dupuis (1824), and Freeman (1843) for the Gold Coast; of Ogilby (1696), Astley (1745-47), and J. Matthew (1788) for Sierra Leone; and of Mollien (1820) for Senegal and the Gambia.