History Of The Ghana Empire
Ghana Empire: As long as Leo Africanus and Luis del Mármol Carvajal were the main sources for early West African history, European historians thought that North African Arabs and the Saharan Berber nomads who took over a lot of the area in the late 1100s were the ones who first set up a state in Sudanic Africa. For example, in 1821, the British geographer James MacQueen said that Ghana was the richest and most important Arab state in the middle of Africa.
When European researchers got their hands on medieval Arabic sources about the history and geography of West Africa, this picture started to change. Leo Africanus and Mármol had said that the kingdoms of Sudanic Africa were not as old as these sources showed. In 1836, Friedrich Stüwe published a study on Arabs’ long-distance trade in the Middle Ages. He used the recently discovered work of al-Bakr to argue that black Africans had already set up their own kingdoms, like Ghana and Takrur, before they met Islamic civilization through trans-Saharan trade in the tenth century.
Middle Age Arabic sources, on the other hand, don’t say anything about who actually started Ghana and the other early countries in the Sudanic zone. These sources only reveal the existence of the kingdom of Ghana during the Arab conquest of North Africa in the late 7th century, under the leadership of a pagan black ruler. So, William Desborough Cooley, who wrote the first modern history of Western Africa, didn’t answer the question of where Ghana came from.
Cooley seemingly agreed with Stüwe that the formation of a state in Sudanic Africa had started on its own. This is because he thought that black Africans had ruled much further into the Sahara in the past than they do now. Cooley also thought that the Berber nomads of the Sahara couldn’t set up and run any big political units. Heinrich Barth was the first European researcher to really think about how Ghana got its start. While traveling in Hausaland, he found a copy of Ta’rı¯kh al-Suda¯n.
This history says that the first state in Sudanic West Africa was the strong empire of Kayamagha. Barth says that this empire was like Ghana for Arabic writers in the Middle Ages. The name “Gana” for the city of Kayamagha made this connection logical. Before the hijra (622), the kingdom of Kayamagha had twenty-two kings, and after it, it had another twenty-two.
There are no other dates given for Kayamagha. Based on this knowledge, Barth concluded that the establishment of the Kayamagha empire (ancient Ghana) occurred around the year 300. According to Ta’rı¯kh al-Suda¯n, the leaders of Kayamagha were “white,” but no one knew what race they were. By the end, Barth thought they were either the Fulani or the Berbers of the Sahara.
It was the first choice that made sense because al-Bakr talked about how the kings of Ghana passed down their power through their mothers. Nomads in the Sahara usually passed down their wealth through women, and Barth thought that the black kings of Ghana got this tradition from their Berber ancestors. The Fulani, the second choice, gained support due to their recent conquest of a significant portion of Sudanic Africa, extending from Senegal to the borders of Bornu. This showed how good they were at making big political units.
Additionally, people did not consider the Fulani to be truly black. European experts couldn’t agree on their ancestry, but they all agreed that, thanks to their supposed Semitic heritage, they were smarter and more civilized than other western African groups. Around the turn of the 1800s, people became more sure that Ghana did not come from Africa. That’s because of three things.
The first was the new philosophy, which stressed how different races are from each other. Colonial historians claimed that more advanced “white” people from the Mediterranean had laid the groundwork for civilization in Sub-Saharan Africa. The colonial powers carried out this task at the time because black people could only serve their “white” masters.
After European colonies took control of Sudan, they discovered oral histories from West Africa. Many of these stories say that the ruling Sudanese families come from either the people who were with Prophet Muhammad or Jemeni warriors. The purpose of these genealogies was to link the dynasties to the sacred history of Islam. However, colonial historians eager to find white founders for the old Sudanese empires took the oral traditions at face value, treating the genealogies as if they were historical records.
The third reason was the idea that cultures have spread around the world over time. People thought that a country couldn’t become civilized on its own; it had to learn the basics of civilization from other countries, like farming, pottery, and metalworking. Cultures can only spread when people move from one place to another. It makes sense that there would be a place where the first steps toward society would be taken.
European historians say that Mesopotamia was the place where culture began and slowly spread to other parts of the “Old World.” Western writers advanced many fanciful theories about Ghana’s origins due to this ideological backdrop. Felix Dubois, a French reporter who lived from 1862 to 1943, followed the French army from Senegal to Timbuktu in 1896. He searched for the beginnings of Sudanese culture in the Nile Valley.
He thought about the idea that Jenne might have been an Egyptian city in the past. It seemed like Dubois’s theory made sense. Heinrich Barth had already thought that it was possible that the people who lived in the Niger Bend inherited their culture from Egypt.
Dubois thought there was a link between the middle Niger Valley and Egypt because he saw similarities in the architecture of the houses of Jenne and the tombs of the pharaohs. Flower Shaw, a British journalist who was born in 1852 and died in 1929, expanded on Dubois’s idea. She wrote in 1905 that white people whose ancestors came from Mesopotamia and Persia founded Ghana. She believed that this group of people had ties to the forces sent by Great King Cambyses of Persia to conquer Ethiopia in 525.
In line with the idea that she thought made the most sense, her hypothesis was that the Fulani came from India. Desplagnes, a French officer, claimed in a 1906 book that Carthaginian settlers were the ancestors of the people who moved to Ghana. The fact that the name “Ganna,” which he used for Ghana, sounds a lot like the Punic family name “Hanno,” supported his idea.
Another sign was that the Bozo and Sorko, believed to be the oldest people to live in the inner delta of the Niger, buried their dead in huge jars. Carthage had a similar practice. Also, the old men of Hombori told Desplagnes that the culture came to the middle of the Niger Valley from the east with red conquerors.
Published in 1912, Maurice Delafosse’s important work, Haut-Sénégal-Niger, was the most influential work on the history of western Africa until the early 1960s. It contained the most popular notion about who founded Ghana. Delafosse asserts that a group of Jewish people who fled Cyrenaica to escape Roman punishment for their failed revolt in 117 founded ancient Ghana.
The refugees arrived in the Niger upstream delta around 150 years ago, led by their chief, Kara. They came before the Fulani people, who live today. Once they got to the western Sahel, Kara’s descendants ruled over the local black people and started the kingdom of Ghana around the year 300. In reality, the black people had already founded the city of Ghana around 200 BCE.
Under the Judeo-Syrian dynasty, this kingdom did very well until 790, when the black people who worked for the Semitic lords rose up and killed them. During this chaos, Kaya-Maghan Sissé took over Ghana. He was the king of Wagadu, a nearby country. This victory finally made the black kingdom of Ghana happen, as we know from Arabic sources from the Middle Ages.
Delafosse didn’t give any direct sources for his story about the Judeo-Syrian founders of Ghana. However, the story is a clever construction based on Fulani oral traditions about their Middle Eastern roots and different, unrelated ideas put forward in earlier works about the early history of Sudanic West Africa. Delafosse’s theory lived on because it fit perfectly with the ideas of colonialism.
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