AGRICULTURE IN MEDIEVAL AFRICA

General Introduction

By the beginning of the medieval period most people across the globe depended on agriculture for at least part of their sustenance. Although some people continued to live by hunting and gathering, especially in more remote areas of the Americas, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region, in most areas populations were too large to support by this method, and agriculture was essential. New technologies and crops appeared throughout the medieval period, allowing farmers to feed increasing numbers of people.

Agricultural methods varied by region, population size, and technological knowledge. Primitive peoples commonly used slash-and-burn agriculture, the practice of cutting down vegetation and burning it to create fields. This technique was used by people who typically moved their fields and perhaps their dwellings from place to place every year or so. Slash-and-burn fields lose their fertility quickly. After a field had been used for crops, the farmers would abandon it and allow natural vegetation to grow over it again while they moved on to new fields. After a few years they could return to an old field and reuse it by the same technique. In the Caribbean people such as the Arawak used slash-and-burn agriculture to grow manioc and other root crops. Throughout Asia people used this method to create their initial fields.

As populations grew, however, creating new fields annually became impractical, and people were forced to farm the same land year after year. This compelled them to solve the problem of the reduction in soil fertility that naturally resulted from growing crops. Crop rotation and fertilizers were the main correctives to this problem. In Europe farmers developed the three-field system, in which two crops were rotated among three fields, one of which was always left to lie fallow and recover its fertility. Medieval Islamic farmers adopted new, more efficient methods of crop rotation and employed fertilizers that eliminated the need to allow fields to lie fallow. Asian farmers used manure to restore fertility to their soil. They also learned to create terraces on hillsides, which permitted rice cultivation in formerly unusable
areas.

Although the details varied by culture, farming was typically a family affair, requiring work from each family member. In Europe the men performed such heavy work such as plowing, women tended kitchen gardens, and children scared away birds that would eat the grain. In many communities in the Americas each family group would be allocated its own plot of land to produce food for their own consumption. Many American peoples divided agricultural work by sex. Among the Taino of the Caribbean islands women tended fields, carried water, and raised animals for eggs and meat, while men did the heavy work of clearing fields and planting crops.

Most people farmed, but not everyone owned their own land. In Europe most land was owned by lords and farmed by peasants, who cultivated crops for both themselves and their landlords. In contrast to Europe, most people in the Islamic world had the right to own property, and thus individual families could own and operate farms. In Africa and the Americas clans divided farmland among their members, allocating each man or woman a plot of land to farm for personal consumption.

Medieval farmers grew a large assortment of crops, many of them the result of careful breeding or international trade. Islamic farmers grew many crops imported from Asia and Africa. Durum wheat, sorghum, rice, fava beans, lentils, chickpeas, pomegranates, lemons, limes, apricots, artichokes, and eggplant were all typical foods in the Islamic world. Common European crops included wheat, barley, oats, peas, beans, and various types of vegetables. In Asia rice continued to be a principal crop, and much of the population of China, India, and Southeast Asia derived most of their calories from it. In the drier or colder parts of Asia, such as northern China, wheat and millet were more common crops. In the Andes people used slash-and-burn fields to grow coca leaves, manioc, peanuts, and sweet potatoes. Throughout much of the Americas people depended on a trio of crops, corn, beans, and squash, which grew well together and provided most of the necessities of a balanced diet. They also grew cotton, which they used for clothing.

African farmers developed numerous varieties of grains, fruits, and vegetables, selecting the species that thrived in their local climates. In West Africa, for example, farmers bred a variety of rice that grew at the same speed as the annual floods. Trade routes that developed in medieval Africa allowed the transfer of crops and agricultural techniques from place to place. Africa had three major environmental zones, each of which lent itself to a different type of agriculture. In the deserts of northern Africa people could not raise crops and restricted themselves to herding livestock. In savanna areas people planted such grains as sorghum and millet, timing their crops to coincide with the annual rainy season. They also raised cattle, though the tsetse fly limited livestock to dry areas. In the forests of central Africa people grew a range of crops, including tubers such as yams, legumes, vegetables, and bananas.

Getting water to crops was a perpetual problem for farmers throughout the world. People came up with a variety of irrigation techniques to get water to their fields. In the Andes people tapped into underground water tables and built aqueducts to move water around. They also constructed raised fields separated by canals and small lakes that both provided water to the crops and controlled temperatures by absorbing and releasing solar radiation. People of Mesoamerica and the southwestern United States built irrigation ditches. In the Rift Valley of Africa farmers used the local rocky landscape to create irrigation canals that used gravity to water fields. In Asia people dug elaborate networks of canals to ensure that water could be distributed over the rice fields at the appropriate times.  Throughout the Islamic world people used machines to help them move and lift water. People dug deep wells and underground tunnels to reach and channel groundwater They also dammed rivers to collect water and release it as needed. A Persian device called a qanat collected water on a hilltop and released it into fields below through a series of underground channels.

Throughout the medieval period, farmers invented devices to make their work easier. New technology such as the moldboard plow (an import from China), wheeled plows, and the horse collar made European farming easier than it had been. By 1500 farming was much more efficient than it had been in 500.

Africa

For the last several millennia up to the present day Africa can be characterized as agricultural because most people have made a living by planting crops, herding livestock, or a combination of the two. The range of environments both today and in the past encouraged an inventive farming tradition in which Africans carefully combined diverse agricultural activities with other modes of food procurement, such as hunting, gathering wild foods, and fishing. Not surprisingly, some of these other strategies were integral to farming in the first place; hunting was necessary to protect crops from wild animals searching for food, and foraging was one of the ways in which Africans became familiar with new food plants, many of which were slowly adopted in the repertoire of cultivated plants and gradually transformed into domesticated species.

Generally, we can identify three environmental zones in Africa, with each corresponding to a different mode of agriculture. Agriculture in the deserts and steppes was limited to the herding of livestock, often in a nomadic or easonally nomadic pattern. In the wooded and grassland savannas an annual rainy season provided moderate water to support grains—such as fonio, sorghums, and millets — and some livestock. The spread of iron technology in the first millennium c.e. was vital to the settlement of the eastern and southern savannas, because iron tools allowed people to break up the hard, packed savanna soils to plant in time for the rains. Dense vegetation supporting tsetse fly and other livestock disease transmitters created a natural limit to cattle keeping, which was most successful in the drier savanna zones or in areas where Africans burned the bush to manage vegetation patterns.

In the moist, densely vegetated African forests located close to the equator, where the rains occur twice a year, Africans grew tuber crops, such as yams, by planting root or stem cuttings with digging sticks long before the spread of iron tools. In both the grain fields of the savannas and tuber gardens of the forests, a range of legumes, wild fruits and vegetables, fish, and disease-resistant smaller livestock like goats and sheep supplemented the primary carbohydrates. By the final centuries of the last millennium b.c.e. foreign foods like Southeast Asian starchy and sweet bananas were cultivated in the forests of eastern and central Africa. Animals also moved along these early routes; chickens and at least two types of cattle spread from Asia throughout Africa well before the medieval era.

In Africa a focus on innovation and experimentation with diverse species created a different kind of agricultural tradition than those found in Eurasia, where adjustments to the landscape were vital to improving productivity. Terracing and irrigation systems did occur in ancient and medieval Africa; the terraces in the hills of Ethiopia, Cameroon, the Darfur region of Sudan, and the Nyanga (formerly Inyanga) area of Zimbabwe serve as primary examples. Likewise, the gravity-fed irrigation canals of the Great Rift Valley in eastern Africa and Engaruka in Tanzania attest to the engineering skills of African farmers. However, most agricultural systems in Africa up to the advent of commercial agriculture in the last century focused on the transformation of plants rather than the landscape. Africans developed hundreds of varieties of rice, bananas, and other plants selected over the centuries to produce specialized varieties for particular environments, drought patterns, taste and texture preferences, pest resistance, flood tolerance, and particular uses, such as beer brewing. West Africans even bred a variety of the indigenous African rice Oryza glaberrima to grow at the same rate as the floods, to ensure that the seed head continues to form even as the waters rise around it.

In Africa, as elsewhere, agriculture was intimately tied to social and political life. Unlike the agricultural histories of Europe or the fertile Mesopotamian valleys, low population densities and plentiful land in most of Africa meant that contestations over farmland were rare. Indeed, leaders struggled to attract people to work the land. Nonetheless, as in other parts of the world, control over food surpluses, access to labor to farm the land, and concerns over the fertility of the soil provided the means by which individuals, especially chiefs and groups, usually lineages, acquired power and status in Africa. In fact, farmers recognized the powers of indigenous peoples living on the lands into which they had slowly spread. Struggles to control the power of these “owners of the land” over local spirits and the ancestor spirits of “first comers” who first permanently settled such lands took place to ensure the fertility of the community and its agriculture. Such struggles have influenced changes in the character of social and political life over the last several millennia, creating numerous configurations of power between chiefs, lineages, and spirit mediums.

By the beginning of the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era farming had already spread across the continent, and communities who adopted this new technology had, through gradual experimentation, successfully integrated it into their economies. As the next thousand years unfolded over much of Africa, regional concentration on certain foods combined with specialization in hunting, fishing, foraging, salt making, and iron production drove internal trade and created opportunities for social and political change.

Eastern and Southern Africa

Research on the agricultural history of Africa has largely focused on the spread of farming across eastern and southern Africa. Interest in the agricultural history of this region was initiated by attempts to explain a particular phenomenon in African history: the process by which related Bantu languages and cultures came to spread over most of eastern and southern Africa. Early scholarship on the Bantu expansions attributed superior technologies of iron production, farming, and pottery making to the Bantu people to explain how they spread across such a vast region, often at the expense of communities of non-Bantu hunter-gatherers and pastoralists. Although we now know that this package of farming, iron, and ceramic technologies did not always spread together or necessarily in connection with the spread of Bantu languages, peoples, and cultures, it is clear that both iron and ceramic technologies were intimately tied to the successful adoption of farming by a variety of communities in eastern and southern Africa, particularly in the dry, hard soils of the savannas.

In eastern and southern Africa this spread of cultivation is characteristic of the Early Iron Age, which, contrary to agricultural histories of Eurasia, was preceded by the spread of pastoralism. By the fall of the Roman Empire in Europe in 476 c.e. farming, iron, and ceramic technologies had largely spread across most of Africa for the different environmental zones. As the Early Iron Age was coming to a close in eastern and southern Africa, farmers were living and interacting with herders and hunter-gatherers; their dynamic relationships enabled the flow of people and knowledge across the fluid boundaries of their communities. Farmers had grown confident in their knowledge about cultivation in familiar environments, such as rich floodplains and moist forests, and were beginning to experiment with plants and animals in drier areas. Although Early Iron Age farmers were practicing mixed agriculture, their focus was on crops rather than livestock. In the savannas farmers made use of abundant land by practicing shifting agriculture: using iron axes to clear new fields, burning the cut vegetation to enrich the soil’s phosphate levels, moving on to new fields every two or three years, and allowing old fields to lie fallow and rejuvenate for 10 or even 20 years. Thus, by the second half of the first millennium c.e., at the close of the Early Iron Age, the small population movements characteristic of shifting agriculture, experimentation with new crops, and the adoption of these technologies by indigenous peoples had resulted in the gradual spread of agriculture across eastern and southern Africa.

In the last centuries of the first millennium c.e. farming societies in eastern and southern Africa experienced a series of economic, social, and cultural transformations that characterize the transition to the Late Iron Age. Transformations associated with the Late Iron Age usually were local developments and elaborations on existing knowledge rather than the result of the spread of peoples, languages, and knowledge, as was the case in the Early Iron Age. The Late Iron Age in eastern and southern Africa was characterized by the development of new Bantu languages and the creation of new pottery styles and local variants on regional styles. However, the most important agricultural transformation was the extension of farming economies into drier environments with the widespread adoption of cattle keeping and new cultural ideas about the economic and social value of cattle.

As a form of wealth that could reproduce itself, cattle provided various opportunities to control other social processes, such as the attraction of dependents through the distribution of cattle or the transition into adulthood through the convention of marriage. The institution of bride-wealth, whereby the groom’s family compensated the bride’s lineage for her reproductive powers with cattle and other gifts, probably dates in some areas to the Late Iron Age. Bride-wealth became an important means by which adult men in the lineage controlled the timing and partners of their sons’, nephews’, and grandsons’ marriages. Older men who had accumulated great herds could demonstrate and augment their wealth and status by using cattle from the herds to marry second and third wives and beget more children rather than using the cattle to fund the marriages of their younger male relatives. Children of a man who had multiple wives provided additional sources of agricultural labor to increase household productivity; when they eventually married, daughters brought in more cattle in the form of bride-wealth.

Archaeological and linguistic evidence for the emergence of cattle keeping provides numerous examples of how this agricultural transformation affected other aspects of life in eastern and southern Africa. A particularly stunning example of the productive powers of cattle and associated social and political developments began on the hard velds of Botswana east of the Kalahari Desert around 900 c.e. Farmers living on the grassy plains had begun to experiment with cattle several centuries earlier, but the turn of the first millennium marked the establishment of a new demographic and social pattern in which densely settled towns with large cattle kraals were surrounded by midsized cattle-herding villages and smaller outposts inhabited by stone-tool-using hunter-gatherer communities with very limited access to cattle. The largest of these capitals gave its name to this emergent culture, Toutswe. In the Toutswe state elites in the towns controlled large herds and could demand valuable bulls in the prime of their reproductive years for consumption from the smaller herding villages. The Toutswe culture illustrates how savvy leaders forged a new, stratified social system based on control of cattle and the appreciation of agricultural activities over those of indigenous, stone-tool-using hunter-gatherers.

Command of cattle was not a foolproof path to power, however. By about 1300 c.e. overgrazing, a series of dry years, and the increasing demand for gold in Indian Ocean trade all contributed to the fall of the Toutswe state and the emergence of Zimbabwean states to the east. Even as Indian Ocean trade allowed leaders of the Zimbabwean states to develop new configurations of power based on control of trade in gold to the coast and beads, cloth, and other prestige items from the coast, cattle herding remained an integral aspect of the elite economy and cattle consumption an important demonstration of status.

In the Great Lakes region of eastern Africa similar processes characterized the Late Iron Age. Farmers focused on cattle keeping and established settlements in drier, savanna environments. Specialized modes of farming in the different environmental zones of the Great Lakes region—intensive banana farming near the lakeshore and river valleys, grain farming in the savannas, and cattle keeping in the driest areas—promoted both internal trade and, eventually, the development of kingdoms. In addition to specialized agricultural surpluses, control of the production of salt and iron and ritual powers ensuring the health of communities, their fields, and their animals, were other important building blocks of authority.

On the East African coast the emerging Swahili culture participated extensively in Indian Ocean trade, eventually developing complex plantation systems in the last centuries of the second millennium c.e. to supply demands for sisal (a fibrous plant used in rope making), cloves, and other cash crops. Even earlier agriculture was an important part of the coastal economy, not only for producing food for the inhabitants of coastal cities but also as a means of demonstrating status. Asian rice, Oryza sativa, had become an important prestige food as early as as 1000 c.e. in cosmopolitan coastal Swahili communities.

In some areas the centralization of political power could not be accomplished through the control of cattle herds. Some time after the 14th century c.e. on the southern fringes of the equatorial forest in the Upemba basin located near the southern border of modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, leaders of the emerging Luba state system initially established their authority by controlling both farming and fishing surplus. Over the coming centuries leaders extended their control to trade, especially in copper, and developed a complex institution of divine kingship, which spread widely throughout the southern savanna; claims to origins in the Luba royal lineage legitimized subsequent states, such as the Lunda kingdom and chieftaincies in eastern and central Zambia.

The Equatorial Forests

There has been little research on the agriculture history of the equatorial forest for this time period. Among a number of reasons for this neglect is the fact that plant remains and even iron and ceramics are not well preserved in the moist forest soils, so there are few data for archaeologists to uncover. Studies based on linguistic evidence have focused on the spread of Bantu languages and agriculture into the equatorial forests and then traced their subsequent spread from the forests into eastern and southern Africa. Thus, the history of the farmers living in the equatorial forests after the introduction of farming is largely unknown.

The early adoption of agriculture to forest environments was probably tied to interactions between hunter-gatherers and early savanna inhabitants practicing mixed farming on the equatorial and western African forest fringes in the early second millennium b.c.e. In the equatorial forests the transition to farming was a gradual process, and farming, iron, and ceramic technologies spread through the forest independently rather than as a Neolithic technological package. By the middle of the first millennium c.e. farmers in the forests of western and equatorial Africa had integrated a rich repertoire of tubers, legumes, and oil palms into their detailed knowledge about forest fruits, vegetables, medicines, meats, and fish. Archaeological and linguistic evidence demonstrates the interdependence of forest hunter-gatherers and farmers, whose relations with each other varied over time; eventually, with the integration of forest peoples into the wider Atlantic trade economy in the 16th century, this relationship took the shape of the more unequal association common today, whereby hunter-gatherers are the clients, or dependents, of farmers. Farmers in the forests were quick to adopt new foods, such as bananas and chickens from Asia via the East African coast and, after the fifteenth century, taro, cassava, and legumes from the New World via the Atlantic coasts of western and central Africa. The extensive system of waterways in the equatorial forest served as a travel network, facilitating the spread of people, ideas, languages, and new agricultural practices.

The Africanist scholar Kairn Klieman elaborates on the agricultural history of the equatorial forest region by exploring how Bantu people moving into the forest interacted with indigenous Batwa hunter-gatherers. By about 500 b.c.e. Bantu peoples gradually adopted a sedentary agricultural lifestyle as a result of the spread of iron technology and banana cultivation, and, in reaction to this increasingly sedentary lifestyle, some Batwa broke off from mixed communities they had shared with their Bantu neighbors to specialize in procuring forest products for trade with farmers. This specialization remained viable throughout the next 2,000 years, until the integration of equatorial forest societies into the Atlantic Ocean trade system in the 16th century. The economically based identities of “farmer” and “hunter-gatherer” limited the ways in which leaders of newly sedentary Bantu farming communities were able to acquire power, but they were hardly rigid categories; members of farming communities became forest specialists and vice versa when it was advantageous to do so. Bantu people had long believed the indigenous Batwa hunter-gatherers of the forests had powerful connections with local nature spirits, deserving of a special politico-religious status within early Bantu communities. However, as Bantu farmers adopted a sedentary lifestyle based on banana farming, they centralized political power in chiefdoms. During the second half of the first millennium c.e. Bantu chiefs reconfigured the older ideology of the primacy of the indigenous Batwa’s powers as “first comers” to the world by asserting the importance of their own Bantu ancestors as first comers either closely allied with or descended from the Batwa. As Bantu chiefs emphasized the importance of their own ancestors, they unseated the Batwa from their previous powerful political and religious roles, celebrating the Batwa as the civilizers of the Bantu even as they recast the Batwa’s role to be more symbolic than powerful.

Later, in upheavals associated with the incorporation of equatorial forest societies into the Atlantic community from the 16th to 20th centuries, power derived from the control of trade and accumulation of personal wealth would come to undermine those older patterns of authority that were based on first-comer status and the intercession between communities, their ancestors, and nature spirits. From Klieman’s research, however, it is clear that the development of social identities and the cosmologies that shaped how societies were organized, how they interacted with each other, and how leaders acquired power were intimately entwined with developments in the agricultural history of the equatorial forest between the 6th and 16th centuries.

On the Fringes of the Sahara: Northern and Western Africa

The agricultural history of northern and western Africa does not follow the same chronology as that of the equatorial forest or eastern and southern Africa. The spread of iron technology, for example, did not occur in conjunction with the development of new farming practices but was adopted into early cultivation practices as an extension of an existing agricultural system. Furthermore, nomadic pastoralism flourished along the dry fringes of the Sahara; interactions between savanna farmers and nomadic pastoralists of the desert fringes characterized social life and political organization for millennia. On the northern coasts farming shared the characteristics and history of other Mediterranean agricultural systems in which farmers grew wheat, grapes, olives, and sometimes barley.

Like farmers in eastern and southern Africa, those in northern and western Africa grew sorghums, millets, and other grains in the savannas to the south and north of the desert, often using a system of shifting cultivation. However, Africans living in the western region could also cultivate an indigenous rice, Oryza glaberrima, using one of three systems: In Guinea, for example, farmers planted rice on hillsides so that rainfall would irrigate the plants; along the Atlantic coast, farmers planted rice in mangrove swamps to ensure adequate moisture; rice planted in floodplains of the Senegal and Niger rivers was watered by floods and the moisture retained in the clay soils. The hundreds of varieties of rice developed by West African farmers was an important factor in the development of early permanent farming settlements and in adaptation to the particular threats associated with each of the three rice cultivation systems.

Changes in relations between sedentary farmers and nomadic pastoralists characterize the period corresponding to the European Middle Ages. By the fourth century c.e. several important technologies had spread into northern and western Africa and transformed the mobility of nomadic pastoralists: cavalry, camels, and chariots. With these new technologies, nomadic pastoralists were able to reconfigure earlier economic transactions in which farmers traded surplus grains, cloth, tools, and other products of sedentary life for pastoralists’ surplus meat and milk. In earlier times farmers had controlled relations because pastoralists, as specialist producers had more need of farmers’ products than vice versa. With the advent of technologies improving the mobility of pastoralists, relations became more balanced and developed into a pattern of alternating pastoralist and sedentary dominance over marginal lands between the steppe and the cultivated savanna. As early as the 14th century the famous Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) interpreted the history of the ninth through the 14th centuries as the alternation of power between sedentary farmers and nomadic pastoralists, with the latter often raiding and conquering the former. Nomadic dynasties ruling over sedentary farmers were, of course, prey to raiding and conquest by other nomadic pastoralists on the savanna fringes. This pattern continued long past the 14th century and is a common theme tying western and northern African history to historical patterns in Eurasia and beyond.

Among the most important historical themes in precolonial West African history is the development of a series of states on the southern edge of the Sahara. The first of these states appeared at the turn of the first millennium c.e., and they continued to emerge, one succeeding the next, into the middle of the second millennium c.e. Generally, the development of the West African states of Ghana, Mali, Kanem, Borno, and the Songhai Empire was tied to control of trans-Saharan trade, particularly the supply of gold from the south to the trade networks spanning the desert. However, the agricultural productivity of these trade empires was central to their survival. Although loss of trade monopolies meant loss of regional predominance, droughts and other agricultural catastrophes could mean the collapse of the state. This was the case with the state of Ghana, which was located between the middle Senegal River and Niger River bend. At the height of its power in the early 11th century, Ghana dominated the trans-Saharan gold trade. By the middle of the 11th century, however, traders had found ways to access gold outside Ghana’s networks. This shift marked the end of Ghana’s trade power but not its demise as a state. It was only in the 13th and 14th centuries, when major climatic shifts threatened the farming lifestyle of its citizens and forced the dispersal of Soninke farmers from their homeland throughout western Africa, that the state of Ghana collapsed completely.

A similar pattern unfolded with the fall of the Axum state in Ethiopia, where trade was the heart of power but the breakdown of agriculture contributed to state disintegration in the eighth century. These examples, coupled with those described for eastern and southern Africa, demonstrate the central role of agricultural activities in the history of state building in Africa and illustrate parallels with similar processes in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

By Kathryn de Luna in "Encyclopedia of Society and Culture in the Medieval World" editor in chief Pam J. Crabtree, Facts on File, 2008. New York, excerpts pp.15-20. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.