The documented early states of the western savanna arose at the southern termini of the trans-Saharan trade routes, largely along the River Niger, at 2,600 miles the major river of West Africa. Ghana, in the west, and Kanem near Lake Chad, were known to Arab geographers before AD 1000. The Empire of Mali, dominated by Mande-speakers, reached its apogee in the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, leaving a profound historical and artistic legacy in the western savanna. Its successor state, Songhai, collapsed in 1591 as a result of Moroccan invasion. The Mossi states (Burkina Faso) rose to power in the fifteenth century, while to their east the Hausa (Nigeria and Niger) lived in numerous city states. Savanna society was marked by distinctions of rank (especially in the west) and ethnicity, under the influence of Islam.
From the late eighteenth century, in the course of an Islamic holy war (jihad) under the Fulani leadership of Uthman dan Fodio, emirates were created in Hausaland and beyond which together formed the Sokoto Caliphate, the most extensive political formation in West Africa at colonialization. This example was followed by Sheikh Hamadu and al-Hajj Umar who established Islamic states in the western savanna during the nineteenth century.
The forest and forest margins included both relatively uncentralized societies and wellorganized states. The kingdoms of Benin and Ife were powerful before European coastal contacts became increasingly important from the mid-fifteenth century. The export of slaves against imports of firearms and other trade goods reoriented both economics and politics. Kingdoms which became powerful between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—including Asante (Ghana), Dahomey (Benin), Oyo (Nigeria)—as well as the city states which arose along the coast, competed with their neighbours to control the wealth to be accrued from the Atlantic trade.
Throughout the savanna and forest regions, and between them, societies of smaller scale than kingdoms were able to resist incorporation by virtue of some combination of their military organization, inaccessibility, and strategic alliances. The internal organization of these societies probably differed even more widely than the centralized societies. Thus, the colonies established when European nations extended their influence beyond the coast during the ‘scramble for Africa’ in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, consisted of peoples whose diversity posed challenges to colonial and later national governments.
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