Behind every great empire stands a people, and behind Wagadou, ancient Ghana, the first great power of West Africa, stand the Soninke. But who were they, and how did they climb to the position from which they could build an empire that would change the world? That story begins not in the Middle Ages, but thousands of years earlier, on a rocky escarpment in a land that had not yet dried out.
The Cliffs of Tichitt
Somewhere in the second half of the third millennium before the Christian era, in what is now the arid southeast of Mauritania, lived a remarkable people who built their houses of dry stone on the rock cliffs above a chain of lakes and marshes. They grew millet and kept livestock, they fished in the lakes and hunted in the surrounding savanna, and they built in a way that still astonishes archaeologists today. The Tichitt culture, located along Dhar Néma, Dhar Tagant, Dhar Tichitt and Dhar Walata, possessed a four-tiered social structure, grain cultivation, metallurgy, countless burial mounds and a rock-art tradition of its own, and more than four hundred settlements have been recovered across an area of eight hundred kilometres. The Tichitt tradition is probably the earliest large-scale, complexly organized society of West Africa west of the Nile valley, and these were the ancestors of the Soninke.
The area was permanently inhabited by agro-pastoralist communities after 2200 to 1900 before the common era. These groups, identified as proto-Soninke speakers of the Mande language family, lived in dry-stone residential compounds, kept cattle, sheep and goats, cultivated pearl millet and smelted iron. They were not nomads and not scattered tribes, but a society with villages, storehouses, trade and governance, millennia before the first Islamic traveller would write about them.
The Desert Advances
The same desiccation that had earlier driven the inhabitants of the Green Sahara southward now reached the Tichitt communities, and over the course of the first millennium before the common era the lakes disappeared one by one, so that one Dhar after another had to be abandoned. Fieldwork at Dhar Tichitt, Dhar Néma and Dhar Walata has shown that as the desert advanced, the local groups moved south, toward the still well-preserved wetlands of what is now called northern Mali, and they took their knowledge, their social structures and their languages with them. Meanwhile pressure came from the north, for around 700 before the common era Libyco-Berber raiders destroyed the emerging state, but the opening of that northern route ultimately changed the economic calculation from raiding to trading. The indigenous Soninke reasserted themselves around 300 before the common era, and trans-Saharan trade and the introduction of ironworking were crucial in the development of the state.
Who Are the Soninke
The Soninke are a West African Mande-speaking people who still live today in Mali, southern Mauritania, eastern Senegal, Gambia and Guinea, and their language is called Soninke, also known as Serakhulle or Azer. Archaeological evidence refutes the later tales of a foreign origin, for the evidence supports an evolution of the Ghana empire and other Mande states from roots in preceding local Soninke cultures, such as that of Dhar Tichitt. Not from North Africa and not from the Middle East, but from their own soil: the Soninke are an indigenous West African people, and their civilization grew out of their own earth, their own traditions and their own experience of the land.
The Soninke were never one single community, for from their midst emerged subgroups that would each play a role of their own in West African history. The Wangara became the great traders of the gold, while the Jakhanke would later be known as Islamic scholars and merchants of peace, men who carried not the sword but the book. The Maraka became farmers and trading planters in the inland delta, and the Sosso would, in a later phase, take up the sword after all and rule the region briefly before Sundiata Keita would break them on the plain of Kirina.
The Griots, the Memory of the People
No understanding of the Soninke is complete without the griot, the professional keeper of oral history, genealogies, myths and wisdom, who in a society without writing was the living archive. He memorized the names of kings and their deeds, he knew the lines of descent of the great families and he could trace the origin of a conflict back across dozens of generations, and he passed it on, from father to son, from master to pupil, in an unbroken chain of oral transmission. When al-Sa’di ﵀ and the author of the Tarikh al-Fattash wrote about the early Sahel in Timbuktu centuries later, they drew largely on what the griots had told them, for the foundations of West African historiography rest on a system of knowledge transmission that the Soninke had perfected long before a single Arabic word was ever written about them.
Our richest Arabic description of the Soninke empire comes from the pen of al-Bakri ﵀, geographer of Córdoba, who completed his work in 1068 of the Christian era, and he described the court of the king of Ghana with a precision that was not equalled a second time in this age. The city consisted of two parts, he wrote, at a distance of six miles from each other: one part was inhabited by Muslims and possessed twelve mosques, while the other part was the royal residence and was called al-Ghaba, the Forest, because it was surrounded by sacred groves in which the ancestral spirits were honoured and which no stranger was allowed to enter.
He described how the king held audience, seated in a pavilion, surrounded by ten pages who stood by him with swords and shields worked with gold. At his right hand sat the sons of the vassal kings, with gold braided into their hair, and before him sat the governor and the ministers in the same posture, while against the gate of the pavilion lay ten horses, covered with gold brocade, and dogs of excellent breed stood at the door, their collars of gold and silver. When a subject wished to greet the king, he knelt down and sprinkled dust on his head, and when a Muslim entered, he clapped his hands, for such was the greeting among them.
Al-Bakri ﵀ also noted how the king skimmed his wealth, for on every load of salt that entered the empire the owner paid one dinar and on every load that left it two, while the gold nuggets that came out of the mines were the property of the king and only the gold dust remained for the miners. In this way, he added, the king preserved the value of his gold, for otherwise so much would come into circulation that it would lose its worth.
The Position That Made Everything Possible
The Ghana empire, also known as Wagadou, arose from a confederation of Soninke clans, and it lay near the upper reaches of the Senegal and flourished thanks to gold from the nearby fields of Bambuk and Buré, so that it became a centralized state that amassed considerable power and wealth through its control over the distribution of gold.
Ancient Ghana stretched across the borderlands between present-day Mauritania and Mali and into the northern parts of present-day Senegal, between the two great rivers, the Niger and the Senegal, and just south of the Sahelian marketplaces that were the crucial transshipment points of the trans-Saharan caravan route. This was no accident, but the result of centuries of insight into how the world around them worked, for the Soninke knew what the Sahara demanded and what the forests of the south offered, and they positioned themselves on the border of those two worlds, exactly as the Sorko and the Gabibi had positioned themselves on the banks of the Niger, because they understood that the border is the most valuable place.
Wagadou and the Serpent
In the oral tradition of the Soninke lives a myth that tells us something about how the people themselves understood the fall of Wagadou. In the heart of the empire, so the tradition went, lived a great serpent named Bida, who dwelt in a well and who, as long as the people offered him a young maiden every year, granted rain to the fields and gold to the earth, so that Wagadou flourished by the favour of the serpent. One year the most beautiful maiden of the empire was chosen to be sacrificed to Bida, but her betrothed, a brave warrior, refused to give her up, and when Bida raised his head from the well to seize the girl, the warrior struck the serpent’s head off. Three times the head grew back, and three times he struck it off. The seventh head, so the tradition says in some variants, flew over Wagadou and cursed the empire with seven years without rain and seven years without gold, and the empire dried up, the trade fell still and Wagadou died.
No one takes this myth literally today, but it tells something true about how a people processes its own downfall. Wagadou fell not through a single battle, but through a combination of climate change, the drying up of wells, the disintegration of trade alliances and the advance of the Almoravids from the north.