READ: Africa 1200-1450

African communities in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries practiced many types of government and social organization. Several large states and densely-populated city-states emerged during this period in particular.

The article below uses “Three Close Reads”. If you want to learn more about this strategy, click here.

First read: preview and skimming for gist

Before you read the article, you should skim it first. The skim should be very quick and give you the gist (general idea) of what the article is about. You should be looking at the title, author, headings, pictures, and opening sentences of paragraphs for the gist.

Second read: key ideas and understanding content

Now that you’ve skimmed the article, you should preview the questions you will be answering. These questions will help you get a better understanding of the concepts and arguments that are presented in the article. Keep in mind that when you read the article, it is a good idea to write down any vocab you see in the article that is unfamiliar to you.

By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

What are some different ways of organizing communities that Africans used in the period 1200-1450?
What group of people were particularly influential in the governing of Swahili city-states?
What kinds of factors helped individuals to elevate themselves to be chiefs and then kings in the southern African region that included Great Zimbabwe?
What kinds of factors helped individuals to elevate themselves to be chiefs and then kings in the Congo River region?
Tyo was a Confederation. Kongo was an empire. What was the difference? What were the similarities?

Third read: evaluating and corroborating

Finally, here are some questions that will help you focus on why this article matters and how it connects to other content you’ve studied.

At the end of the third read, you should be able to respond to these questions:

To what extent does this article explain how and why states in Africa developed and changed over time?
What factors stand out to you as particularly distinct and important in the way communities were organized in Africa in this period? How do these seem similar or different to other parts of the world you have studied for this period?

Now that you know what to look for, it’s time to read! Remember to return to these questions once you’ve finished reading.

Africa 1200-1450

By Trevor Getz

Chieftaincies, kingdoms, confederations, empires

Except for a thin piece of land on the eastern edge of Egypt—an isthmus—Africa is geographically separated from Eurasia by bodies of water. But thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Africa was not exactly “a world apart” from Eurasia. Many of its diverse societies were bound to European and Asian societies by trade, conflict, and shared values and beliefs. They were also connected through networks and systems that historians have largely overlooked. But not us! In Unit 2, we will look closely at some of these networks. Here, though, our focus will be specifically on the ways in which Africans in this period constructed and managed their many different communities.

In this period of African history, Africans invented and shared many different ways of organizing communities. Finding general patterns between these communities is difficult partly because of their diversity, and partly because of the misconceptions we in Europe and the United States have about Africa. We have been trained by the media to think of Africans as living in “tribes”, some sort of barbarous and unchanging system of basic ethnic affinity. The reality is that Africans, like other people in this era, had lots of different systems of government and ways of tying themselves together culturally and politically. We will explore some of these when we focus on West Africa and on the Bantu diffusion in other articles, but here we can say a few things about the range of societies a person travelling through Africa might have encountered in this period:

Lineage-based systems were largely governed by groups of elders who were all related to each other by ancestry or, sometimes, by adoption.
Sodalities, brotherhoods and sisterhoods of people usually of similar ages, often played an important role in decision making.
Chieftaincy, in which an individual had quite a bit of power to make decisions over a community, was not uncommon.
Kingdoms with highly established bureaucracies, often including Islamic or Christian scribes and other elites, had developed in many regions. In many cases the ruler was selected from among members of the royal family or families, rather than just being chosen—as was often the case in most European monarchies—just because he or she was the ruler’s first born.
City-states focused on trade, often with merchants as their rulers.
Confederations, meaning alliances of several or many states, often arose in regions where collective security was important.
Finally, we can point to some states and suggest that they were empires, with a core community or state having taken over and ruling others.

It would be worthwhile looking at all of these types of communities, but for the purposes of global comparison in this era we will focus on just a few examples of larger states. We will not look too closely at West Africa in this article, since that region is featured in another article.

The Indian Ocean trade and Swahili society

One important type of state that emerged in this era was the city-state of the Indian Ocean coast. We generally group these city-states together as the Swahili states, but culturally they were pretty diverse. Swahili society indicates the mixing of Bantu-speaking fishing and farming communities with the Islamic religion. Also, Arabic script was shared by many societies around the Indian Ocean. Swahili societies, living along this coast, found it very profitable to trade goods from the interior—like rock quartz, ivory, and later gold—with Arab and Indian merchants who brought goods from Asia. Because trade was so central, Swahili communities focused in this period on port cities, rather than on controlling large areas of land.

Most of these port cities were ruled by kings who emerged from wealthy merchant families, but almost always with very limited power. That power stayed mostly in the hands of the merchant communities as a whole. Merchants were particularly focused on policy that would enhance the city-state’s ability to trade effectively. In at least one Swahili city of this period—called Lamu—there was no king at all, just a group of merchant families who made decisions together. They ruled over a multi-cultural society that mixed different Arab and African communities. Not all were treated equally, but the city-states generally thrived. Soon, Swahili merchant-families were banding together to build their own ships and run their own trading expeditions, even settling in new cities up and down the coast.

Southern Africa and Great Zimbabwe

In the southern regions of Africa, Bantu-speaking societies had developed a whole range of Chieftainships before 1200. Chiefs could become wealthy, in many cases, by controlling cattle. Cattle were a big deal because they represented wealth, and so more cattle meant higher social status, especially for men. In many cases, wealthy chiefs used their cattle to gain lots of followers, and because this wealth was inherited, they could distinguish their families as “royal” families. Often, they built their wealth by marrying many women from among other powerful families. These wives then played an important political role, representing their own families in the courts of their husbands.

Chieftaincies and small kingdoms were emerging in this very mineral-rich region, and trade between them, often in metals, stimulated quite a bit of growth. But it was the arrival of Swahili merchants and their demand for gold that really got the economy moving. This region had a great deal of gold, and before 1300, a new Swahili city-state called Sofala was built along the south-east coast of Africa to try to get at it. They found themselves negotiating with one of the largest southern African states of all—Great Zimbabwe.

Great Zimbabwe had been built by a cattle-herding community—ancestors of today’s Shona-speakers—who managed to dominate a large gold-producing region. They may have descended from the rulers of an earlier state named Mapungubwe. Their state was centered on a truly monumental city that we call Great Zimbabwe, but it also had many rural provinces, each with its own administrative center, but all answerable to the king. The rulers of this state dominated the export of gold to Sofala, and from there to the Indian Ocean. They also continued the policy of using cattle to beef up their power, securing the loyalty of chiefs in the provinces by loaning them cows and bulls.

Tyo and Kongo

Far to the west, large states were emerging around the same time in the basin of the Congo River. This region was fertile and quite easy to cultivate. It was surrounded by regions where cultivation was more difficult—dry sands to the south, rainforest nearby—and where societies often remained smaller in scale and ruled through sodalities (brotherhoods and sisterhoods), elders, or chiefs. But near the Congo River itself, states grew much larger around 1200 CE (possibly earlier), and two of these were Tyo and Kongo.

Two great factors led to the emergence of these large states. The first was population growth, which made it necessary for societies to develop new ways to solve problems and maintain peace. A lot of this work happened through community, religious, and spiritual figures. However, as communities grew larger, so did disputes between communities, and they needed someone to judge these disputes. Historians believe that kings arose to play this role, because the words for king in this region are related to words that mean to “judge”. In addition, trade in the region was growing dramatically in the thirteenth century, both in cloth and in metals. This was all local trade, because the Atlantic (unlike the Indian Ocean) was not a great trading zone yet, but the “local” in this case meant thousands of miles of a vast continent!

The kingdom of Tyo emerged around 1200. Its people, the Teke, were well situated to control trade moving north-to-south and between the coast and the forest. Their power was also built around a national shrine, which was probably where disputes were resolved. But the kingdom was also something of a confederation, as it was made up of several small kingdoms and chieftaincies that had come together under a single ruler. Over time, the power of the kings became more significant and centralized.

Kongo was formed nearby in the fourteenth century. It was also built from several smaller kingdoms that were brought together by one ruler, Lukeni lua Nimi, who became particularly powerful. Kongo dominated cloth production in the region, and also could tax trade along a long stretch of the Congo River. It also dominated a region where the very rare shell called nzimbu was found. This shell served as a currency. Over time, the Kongo kings became so powerful that by about 1450 they ruled an empire with neighboring states like Ndembu and Mbwila under their authority. But their power was always quite tenuous, because they relied heavily on the sub-kings who ruled the provinces as well as the religious figures—kitomi—who were important in rural communities.

Conclusions

Despite what is normally taught in American or European schools, states and communities in Africa were sophisticated and complex in this period, if quite diverse. We have not even been able to touch on entire regions of the African continent in this article. Unfortunately, later events—including the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism—wiped out much of this history, and we have only begun to recover it in the last 50 years or so. As we will see in the next unit, many of these states were also taking part in long-distance trade routes and networks through which flowed ideas and beliefs like Islam, Christianity, and more.

Author bio

Trevor Getz is a professor of African and world history at San Francisco State University. He has been the author or editor of 11 books, including the award-winning graphic history Abina and the Important Men, and has coproduced several prize-winning documentaries. Trevor is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes.

Sources

Ehret, Christopher. The Civilizations of Africa, A History to 1800, 2nd edition. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016.

Fauvell, Francois-Xavier. The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Hilton, Anne. The Kingdom of Kongo. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.

Image credits

Swahili city-states and the Indian Ocean. Still from the video Omani Empire. By WHP, CC BY-NC 4.0. https://www.oerproject.com/OER-Materials/OER-Media/Videos/1750/Unit1/The-Omani-Empire

Remains of a walled enclosure at Great Zimbabwe. One of the hallmarks of this state was its sophisticated architecture, which can be found in the surrounding provincial centers as well as the capital. © Werner Forman/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

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