Pharaohs of Kush, the trading empire of Aksum, the gold of Ghana and Mali, the stone city of Great Zimbabwe — three thousand years of African states.
Stop 01 · 8th–7th century BCE
The Kingdom of Kush
South of Egypt, along the Nile in what is now Sudan, the Kingdom of Kush grew rich on gold, ivory and trade. Independent again from about 1070 BCE, its religious heart was Napata, beneath the holy mountain of Jebel Barkal. In the 8th century BCE its kings turned the tables on their old overlord: Piye marched north and took Memphis, and his successors ruled Egypt for nearly a century as the 25th Dynasty, until Assyrian invasions drove Taharqa and Tantamani back south; by 656 BCE Egypt was lost. Probably around 591 BCE the capital moved to Meroë, rich in iron ore. Kushite rulers built hundreds of pyramids: about 255 are known, more than double Egypt's total.
South of Egypt, along the Nile in what is now Sudan, the Kingdom of Kush grew rich on gold, ivory and trade. Independent again from about 1070 BCE, its religious heart was Napata, beneath the holy mountain of Jebel Barkal. In the 8th century BCE its kings turned the tables on their old overlord: Piye marched north and took Memphis, and his successors ruled Egypt for nearly a century as the 25th Dynasty, until Assyrian invasions drove Taharqa and Tantamani back south; by 656 BCE Egypt was lost. Probably around 591 BCE the capital moved to Meroë, rich in iron ore. Kushite rulers built hundreds of pyramids: about 255 are known, more than double Egypt's total.
By the 3rd century CE, Aksum, in the highlands of what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, controlled trade between the Roman world, Arabia and India, shipping ivory through its Red Sea port of Adulis. The prophet Mani named it as one of the world's four great kingdoms, with Rome, Persia and China. From the 3rd century it minted its own coins in gold, silver and bronze, among the first African states to do so and raised towering carved stelae over royal graves. Around 330 CE (the date is debated) King Ezana adopted Christianity, making Aksum one of the first states anywhere to do so: the root of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Around 520 King Kaleb conquered Himyar in Yemen.
In the western Sahel, in today's Mauritania and Mali, the Ghana Empire, which the Soninke called Wagadu, controlled the trans-Saharan trade: gold from the south exchanged for salt from the desert. 'Ghana' was a royal title meaning war chief; the modern country, the former Gold Coast, took the name at independence in 1957. Arab writers called it the land of gold; its king claimed every nugget, leaving traders the dust. In about 1068 the geographer al-Bakri, who relied on informants in Spain, described the king's court and a capital of two towns, one with twelve mosques; it was probably the ruins at Koumbi Saleh. Whether the Almoravids conquered Ghana around 1076 is disputed; by 1203 the Sosso had taken it.
After Aksum faded, the Ethiopian highlands passed to the Zagwe, an Agaw dynasty ruling from about 1137 to 1270. Its best-known king, Gebre Meskel Lalibela, reigned about 1181–1221 from Roha, in the mountains of Lasta. Tradition says that after Saladin captured Jerusalem in 1187, Lalibela set out to build a new Jerusalem, and the town's stream is still called the Jordan. Eleven churches were cut downward into the volcanic rock and linked by trenches and tunnels; scholars now think they took shape over several phases of work. In 1270 the last Zagwe king was killed by the forces of Yekuno Amlak, founder of the Solomonic dynasty. They remain an important place of pilgrimage.
Around 1235 Sundiata Keita, a Mandinka prince whose story griots handed down for generations, defeated Soumaoro Kanté of Sosso at the Battle of Kirina and founded the Mali Empire. From his capital at Niani it grew to stretch from the Atlantic coast deep into the Sahel, taking in the old lands of Ghana. Its most famous ruler, Mansa Musa made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324. In Cairo he gave away so much gold that, according to al-Umari, its value there stayed depressed for at least twelve years. Later Arabic accounts put 12,000 slaves in his caravan, figures historians treat as rhetoric. Timbuktu, now under Mali, became a renowned centre of Islamic scholarship.
On the plateau between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers the Shona built Great Zimbabwe, a city of massive dry-stone walls raised without mortar between the 11th and 15th centuries. The walls of its Great Enclosure stand up to 11 metres high and run for about 250 metres. Taking over from Mapungubwe around 1300, its rulers grew wealthy exporting gold and ivory through the Swahili ports such as Sofala. Chinese porcelain, Arabian coins and Persian glass beads have been found in its ruins. Perhaps 10,000 to 18,000 people lived there. From the 15th century trade shifted north and west, and by the 16th century power had moved away.
On the East African coast, Swahili trading towns linked the interior with Arabia, Persia, India and China. Kilwa, an island town off southern Tanzania, became the leading port of the southern coast. Local tradition says it was founded in the 11th century by Ali bin al-Hasan, a prince from Shiraz in Persia. Its merchants traded gold, iron and ivory from as far inland as Zimbabwe for beads, cloth, porcelain and spices. Ibn Battuta visited around 1331 and ranked it among the world's most beautiful cities. Sultan al-Hasan ibn Sulaiman built the palace of Husuni Kubwa and enlarged the coral-stone Great Mosque. In 1505 a Portuguese force under Francisco de Almeida besieged and sacked the town.
In the 1400s Songhai, centred on Gao on the Niger, overtook Mali and became one of the largest states in African history. Sonni Ali (reigned 1464–1492) took Timbuktu in 1468; Muslim chroniclers remembered him as a tyrant. Under Askia Muhammad, who seized power in 1493, it was run by a professional administration and army, and he made the pilgrimage to Mecca in the late 1490s. It fell in 1591, when Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur of Morocco sent Judar Pasha across the Sahara with about 4,000 men, many armed with firearms. At the Battle of Tondibi, near Gao, gunfire turned back a stampede of 1,000 cattle and the Songhai army broke.
Near the mouth of the Congo River, Kongo was ruled from Mbanza Kongo, in today's northern Angola. The Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão reached its coast in 1483, and in 1491 King Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptised as João I. His son Mvemba a Nzinga, Afonso I, defeated his half-brother for the throne and reigned from 1509 until 1542 or 1543. He funded a Catholic church from taxes, and his schools had over 1,000 pupils by 1516. Afonso himself sent slaves to Portugal as payment, but in 1526 he protested to the Portuguese king that traders and nobles were kidnapping free Kongolese, and he set up a committee to check that those sold had been lawfully enslaved.
In the forest belt nearer the coast, Benin, ruled by its obas, was famous for its court art of brass plaques, heads and carved ivory. Oyo was a Yoruba cavalry empire until Ilorin destroyed its capital in 1835. Asante, founded in 1701 when Osei Tutu defeated Denkyira at Feyiase, drew its wealth from gold, with the Golden Stool as the symbol of its unity. All traded with Europeans on the coast, including, tragically, in enslaved people. Europeans held only about a tenth of Africa in the 1870s, but the 'Scramble for Africa' after 1880 brought nearly the whole continent under colonial rule. British troops sacked Benin City in 1897, carrying off its bronzes; by 1914 only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent.