UNESCO Ancient Civilizations of Africa (Editor G. Mokhtar)

The societies of Africa south of the Sahara in the early iron age
need for leadership consequent upon a population increase in a particularly
favourable environment.
Turning from hypothesis to fact, the only area in which we can convincingly
assert that a kingdom existed in the period under review was at
the western edge of the Sudan, where the kingdom of Ghana was certainly
in existence by +700 and could have been emerging for up to a thousand
years. The reasons for its growth must have been its control of valuable
mineral resources (copper, iron and gold, in the probable order of their
exploitation); its control of the salt trade; and possibly its location in an
area of primary development of an agricultural mode of life, as represented
by the Tichitt sequence. A detailed account of the state will be found in the
next volume; but it is probably no coincidence that the growth of ancient
Ghana, the building of the Senegambian megaliths and the rich burial
mounds of Senegal were contemporaneous developments. They were
probably related parts of the same pattern of economic growth.
As we have seen in the preceding chapters, there is no uniform ending
to the period under review as there is for North Africa; nevertheless the
arrival of the Arabs in North Africa was ultimately to affect either
directly or indirectly much of West and East Africa. We have seen that by
+800 most of Africa was firmly in the iron age. The forest margin was
being slowly eroded by the advance of agriculture, both in West Africa and
in southern Central Africa. Population was increasing. The first phase of the
agricultural revolution had involved the rapid expansion of small groups of
arable cultivators, who probably obtained a great deal of their protein by
using the age-old, well-tried methods of their stone age hunting and
gathering ancestors. Much of their hunting equipment was the same as their
predecessors'; nets, bone and horn fish-hooks and wooden spears and
arrows, perhaps still barbed at times with microliths or the sharpened ends
of antelope horns or similar natural substances. In a few cases it was
supplemented by more efficient, though costly, iron arrowheads and more
quickly made fish-hooks. Much of their mythology and religion must also
have been derived from their foraging forebears, but as life became more
settled they developed new beliefs based on the mysteries of agriculture
and metal-working. Some of these beliefs had probably been passed on by
the people who transmitted the new mysteries. The iron age farmers were
more creative, moulding pots, carving drums, making baskets, smelting
iron, forging tools. Their religion was becoming centred on creative deities,
and their systems of belief were aimed at ensuring salvation from the
vicissitudes of a Nature to which the agriculturalist is more vulnerable.
Their ritual and music were probably more elaborate, their material culture
was more varied and their sense of tradition and social continuity was more
firmly established. Fundamental changes had taken place in society which
ultimately affected all the succeeding periods of African history.
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