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In the mid-18th century, at the royal court of Gondar, the scriptorium of King Iyo’ās (1755-1769) imported sheets of paper to make a lectionary (senkesar) in three volumes. Today, one volume remains in Addis Ababa at the Ethiopian National Archives and Library Agency, Department of Manuscripts, under the serial number 197. It is the only known Ethiopian Christian manuscript on paper. In Ethiopia, Christians copied their manuscripts exclusively on parchment. This innovative and ambitious project met the most sophisticated Ethiopian standards while adapting the codicological norms to the requirements of this new medium. Craftsmen who knew how to work on paper, foreigners or Ethiopians trained by foreigners, made this volume. The status of this manuscript was high enough to be part of the imperial library at the turn of the twentieth century and then included in the national heritage collection.

The Wärğəḥ Muslim community constitutes more than 22,000 people in Ethiopia. They live in diverse parts of the country, but the largest number of Wärğəḥ are found in north Šäwa and near Dəre Dawa. In north Šäwa, the community of Wärğəḥ has established scattered pockets of villages between Däbrä Berhan and Säbäta towns. Linguistically, they speak Oromo and also Amharic. Fragmentary medieval Ethiopian historical sources describe the Wärğəḥ as inhabitants of the lowlands of south-east Šäwa. They were herdsmen, particularly camel keepers. Post-16th century sources record that the Wärğəḥ transformed their way of life to become traders following the great medieval caravan trade routes. Due to their resistance against expansions, they were described as warriors and a ferocious people. For the purpose of this paper, we have gathered oral accounts from 13 local villages of north Šäwa to identify how these people reconstruct their history and to understand how all these villages networked with each other to endure the waves of dynamic religious and population movements of these periods. Funerary stelae were also surveyed to determine whether their styles could be related to the megalithic cultures of south-west Ethiopia.

This paper explores the dynamic between local, regional, and global forces for the Comoro Islands between the 1873 treaty mandating abolition of the export slave trade from Zanzibar to the imposition of French suzerainty over the Comoro Islands in 1886. Locally, my context is the Comoro Islands; regionally, it takes in the Mozambique Channel and wider southwest Indian Ocean; globally, it is the larger British imperial antislavery campaign in the western Indian Ocean. My paper seeks specifically to understand how the final years of political rivalry and slaving in this region affected matters both local and regional. By examining these events in some detail I hope also to reveal the economic and social networks that connected the people of the Comoros to each other, and beyond the Comoros to Zanzibar and coastal Mozambique. In the process, I illustrate how British abolitionism played out in the Comoros.

This paper focuses on Iwo, an ancient Yoruba city that traces its roots to Ile-Ife and one of the cities that received, accommodated, and integrated refugees from various parts of Yorubaland during the 19th century. It investigates the concessions made by members of the Iwo ruling class to accommodate the influx of military and civilian populations from various parts of the disintegrating Old Oyo Empire. The paper utilizes published works on urbanization in Africa and oral traditions collected by the author between 1978 and 2018. Although limited in quantity and significance, Western missionary travelogues and archival information are also consulted. In addition to explaining changes in the layout of the city and its outlying townships and villages, the paper examines the scenography of power among the ruling elite and the advent and impact of Islam in Iwo.

In 1347, the western and Mediterranean parts of the Old World recorded the first outbreaks of a returning mortal disease that would make its presence felt over several centuries. Known today as the Second Plague Pandemic—a zoonosis due to the bacterium Yersinia pestis—it scythed between a third and half of the population without regard for wealth or status. It deeply transformed all facets of societies, ignited fears, violence, and pogroms, tested the flexibility of religions, hierarchies, and traditions, and excited ambitions. Although the plague is commonly described as a pandemic, historical knowledge about the initial Black Death and the many recurrent waves of the disease is largely restricted to Western Europe and the Mediterranean world, where the literate elite left an impressive documentary record that served as resource to the long-lasting and flourishing heuristic tradition of Plague Studies. If, as suggested by Monica Green, the concept of ‘pandemic’ is to be taken seriously, we must consider the many excluded parts of the Old World, and especially Africa, in our plague narratives. We must recognize that these societies that did not practise ‘the reduction of speech to graphic forms’—to use the expression coined by Jack Goody—also could have experienced the brutal mortality of the plague and its radical transformative power, while producing no organized and specific, long-lasting traces. By extension, we must also recognize that all literate societies that had in common the art of writing did not practise this art in the same way and may not have produced identical categories of documentary records. Cultural differences affect the nature of the documentary archive, as illustrated by literate practices in medieval Nubia and Ethiopia. The invisibility or limited visibility of the plague in the documentary record is, therefore, a challenge for historians and a disguised invitation to accept the absence of evidence as evidence of absence. This paper is my attempt to resist this temptation, to challenge the quasi-absence of interest in the plague problem in the historiography of Sub-Saharan Africa, and to lay out the foundation of a research strategy that will be multi-disciplinary and comparative. The plague problem is not a footnote to African history. If the plague impacted African societies as it did in documented parts of the Old World, we must have missed or misread fundamental processes of change it entailed. Would we understand and interpret the history of Western Europe or the Mediterranean as we do if we ignored that the plague had occurred? Here, I do not solve the plague conundrum in Sub-Saharan Africa; rather, I build on the persuasive arguments made by other contributors to this special issue about the presence of plague in different parts of Africa before the 19th century. My purpose is to propose multiple, critical, and cumulative—but far from exhaustive—pathways to reading and rereading the traditional and less traditional sources of African history in the light of the possibility of societal crises related to plague. Besides presenting fragments of evidence, this paper also serves as an introduction to three groundbreaking papers exploring the archaeological, documentary, and genomic sources of the disease in the African past.

Whilst mobility has long been a key theme within African archaeology, its study has usually focussed on cases of far-ranging nomadism, particularly amongst ‘hunter-gatherer’ pastoralist populations. Conversely, changes in the form and distribution of sedentary settlement have most commonly been studied across wide spatio-temporal ranges that do not consider the role of mobile livelihood practices at scales appreciable to the people who actually performed them. This paper seeks to rectify this scholarly lacuna through the practical application of the concept of ‘shifting sedentism’ amongst the communities of Kenya’s northern Elgeyo Escarpment. Combining archaeological/contemporary household survey data with local oral histories, this paper explores how the incremental movement of individual housing compounds has contributed to the gradual shift of Marakwet settlement across the landscape over the past two centuries. Shifting patterns of residence will be linked with broader trends in mobile livelihood practice that extend across the surrounding landscape and run through multiple generations. These practices have themselves adeptly incorporated many major changes to community lifeways—including the introduction of new crops, Christian missionisation, road building and the growth of small commercial centres. Such practices embody a particularly flexible approach to socio-cultural continuity, in which situational mobility has been vital in ensuring the overarching resilience of these communities and the rugged landscape they call home. Fine-grained and multi-disciplinary approaches are key to the recognition of mobility’s importance within such otherwise sedentary contexts, and it is hoped this particular study will inspire further such efforts across the continent.

This paper focuses on the study of burial practices, including biological anthropology and archaeothanatology, through archaeological excavations of two burial sites in the historical city of Mbanza Kongo, the former capital of the Kongo kingdom. Beyond some aspects related to funerary archaeology, the goal of this paper is to understand the chronology of excavated burials, the spatial distribution of graves and their architecture as well as burials methods. The main objective is also trying to understand how in the burials area, local worship practices alight themselves in a dogmatic and ideological environment influenced by Christianity. The paper aims to compare burials dynamism and practices between ancient’s christian and public cemeteries in Mbanza Kongo as well as those in the Northern provinces of the Kongo Kingdom. This medieval African society at the forefront of cultural blending, has experienced various forms of resilience including in the field of burials.

Many archaeological sites in the central West African savanna were either abandoned or reduced in size between the 14th and 15th centuries CE. Explanations have tended to invoke the effects of climate change (increasing aridity), political transformations, and religious conversion. However, more recently scholars have increasingly suggested that this regional pattern could be in part the result of plague epidemics. In this paper we explore the methodological challenges inherent in linking abandonments with the effects of epidemics in the archaeological record through a contextualized examination of settlement pattern data from recent archaeological research at sites in Burkina Faso and Mali. While plague cannot be definitively identified based on settlement pattern data alone, current evidence supports the possibility that plague affected populations in this area of West Africa. A broader view of sites throughout West Africa indicates that the possible effects of plague were widespread.

The Mäṣḥafä Seddät (“Book of Persecution”) is the Christian version of the description of the wars initiated by Imām Aḥmad from the Barr Sa‘d ad-Dīn sultanate against the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia between the 1520’s and the year 1543. In the first half of the eighteenth century, this short text in ge‘ez was inserted into the text of the so-called “short chronicles”. But the Mäṣḥafä Seddät is independently known in three Christian manuscripts and was probably written at the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century, by an ecclesiastic of a monastery of Enfrāz in Bagémder. This paper proposes the hypothesis that to compose his text, the author had access to and was largely inspired by a copy of the Arabic text of the Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša (“The Conquest of Abyssinia”), the Islamic account of the wars of imām Aḥmad written in Harar in the middle of the sixteenth century by a Muslim scholar. This possible case of contact between a Muslim text from the Barr Sa‘d ad-Dīn and a Christian author from the highlands provides an opportunity to question the commonly accepted separation between the Islamic and the Christian manuscripts produced in Ethiopia in the sixteenth century.

This article aims to discuss Islamic expansion in West Africa during the 16th and 17th centuries along with carved ivory production. The analysis concerns the Greater Senegambia, a region comprised of the Senegal River basin in the north, the Futa Jalon plateau in the east, and northern Sierra Leone in the south. The study is based on European written sources, African oral traditions, and African carved ivories owned by the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, Germany. Its main hypothesis is that the 16th and 17th centuries comprised the moment of Islamic social expansion, before Islam turned into a major political force in Senegambia during the 18th and 19th centuries. Therefore, this paper’s goal is to present a conjoint understanding of the ivory pieces and early Islamic expansion, by focusing on the images carved in ivory saltcellars that are associated with Western African Islamic written culture.

Apprehending, if not defining, Swahili identity is a constant concern of studies dealing with the Muslim communities settled on the shores of precolonial East Africa. Beyond the common – and sometimes redundant – questioning, it seems useful to deepen the analysis of the relationships between the main urban settlements and their mainland hinterland. Based on the case of the Lamu Archipelago ca.1600-1800, this paper aims to enlighten the links between social hierarchy and spatial hierarchy. Surely the Swahili towns were not conceived as open spatial units, yet they kept close relationships of interdependence with the mainland and worked like integrative bodies of great efficiency. Thus, beyond the legitimating discourse spread by the urban elites, it is shown that the porosity and fluidity of the territory of the coastal city-states mirrored the ambiguities of Swahili identity, which permeable and shifting nature should be admitted.

This paper reports the first systematic excavations of Tadmekka, one of the major West African trading towns that enabled the huge growth of cross-Saharan trade during the early Islamic era (c. AD 650-1500). In 2005 excavations at Tadmekka’s contemporary site (‘Essouk’ in northern Mali) yielded a 6.5 m excavated sequence, dating from the mid-first millennium AD to c. 1400. Subsequent analysis has significantly improved understanding of the town’s ‘prehistoric’ and historic periods, and shown how the archaeology presents a wealth of evidence of significance for wider debates. Following a background to the project and a full presentation of its results, we build up an improved story of Tadmekka’s development, by placing the archaeology side by side with the evidence provided by early Arabic records of Tadmekka. We then focus on a number of specific studies conducted on the material. Particularly important areas of the evidence focused on are Tadmekka’s building traditions, defined in historical records as amongst the most noteworthy in medieval West Africa, and also its gold coinage, a unique and fascinating offshoot of the West African gold trade. We also concentrate on other important new evidence of relevance for wider West African debates, including trade goods from across the Sahara, important patterns in the ceramic sequence, evidence of local industries, and interesting findings related to dietary practices.

The distinctive coinage of the Swahili Coast (c. 800–1500) has for a long time been seen as a barbarized coinage on the edge of the Islamic world, a product of colonial settlements of Arabs and Persians. With new evidence becoming available, the towns have taken their place as flourishing African trading ports, homogenously developed from local villages. One of the most durable remains of archaeological material culture in these towns, the coins, has not received the same attention, despite their being one of the keys to further understanding the Swahili stone towns. By deconstructing the previous hunt for precedents, it is argued that the coins are a stand-out marker of the Swahili stone town culture and not simply poor copies of other Islamic Indian Ocean coinages. However, their role both on the Swahili Coast and the Indian Ocean world is still poorly understood; and in the search for a clearer idea of their purpose, this paper not only looks at them from a local perspective, but also looks at the wider implications for coin use in the Indian Ocean trade.

Recent researches on plague invite scholars to enlarge the chronology and the geography of the Black Death. If, according to the commonly admitted chronology, the Black Death occurred in Western Europe from 1347 to 1350, it is now evident that outbreaks of the Black Death occurred in the Near and Middle East long after the mid-14th century. In Egypt, historical sources show outbreaks of the plague during the 15th century, with regular waves in 1403, 1407, 1430, 1460, and later. Many Ethiopian written sources refer to pandemics shaking the kingdom and causing thousands of deaths. Chronicles and lives of Saints abound in scattered notations on the need to bury the victims of these pandemics with a particular process. The Saints embody figures of miraculous healing, and the reading during Mass services of hagiographic texts dedicated to these Saints provided hope to the victims of the pandemics. On the basis of these testimonies, however, it is often impossible to identify what disease was the cause of the pandemic. The synchrony between pandemics observed in Egypt and those observed in Ethiopia, as well as the diplomatic, commercial, and religious links between Ethiopia and Egypt, permit us to interpret some of the pandemics described in the Ethiopian sources as plague pandemics. After a presentation of Ethiopian sources dealing with pandemics from the 13th to the 15th century, the questions of the vocabulary used to designate epidemics, and the identification of the diseases involved, the paper then provides an overview of plague outbreaks in regions neighbouring Ethiopia, particularly in Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, combined with an examination of the Horn of Africa’s connections with these regions. The last section focuses on social responses to epidemics in Ethiopia in an attempt to identify and singularize them, according to the attitudes adopted. The introduction of the commemoration of Saint Roch in the Ethiopian synaxary and in the collections of Ethiopian magical prayers is finally resolving the doubt about the likelihood of a plague epidemic in Ethiopia.

In the West African Sahel, Islam induced processes of cognitive change as spaces and history were given new meaning over time. In the expanding Muslim universe, they were reconstructed with reference to the core regions of the Islamic world and the founding events of Islam. This brought issues of cognitive dissonance to the interpretation of the past, when people were simultaneously confronted with different and incompatible heuristic heritages. This paper investigates such changes in the representation of the past in the Tadmăkkăt / Ǝssuk valley of northern Mali between the Middle Ages and the 1980s. As social interactions were restructured and renegotiated among nomads from the seventeenth century onwards, some groups formulated new status claims by borrowing afresh from the Islamic repertoire. The commercial role the area had played in the Middle Ages ceased to be worth remembering. A new interpretation of the past was imposed upon the valley, and even well-dated Arabic medieval inscriptions were given new meaning. After 1980, the rise of Tuāreg nationalism fostered yet another interpretation of the past of the ancient site. Cognitive dissonance is also displayed in the descriptions of the course of the Niger provided by Leo Africanus in the 16th century, and Muḥammad Bello in the 19th.

Feasting is a central component of elite power strategies in complex societies worldwide. In the precolonial Kingdom of Dahomey, located in the Republic of Bénin, public feasts were a critical component of royal strategies to attract and bind political subjects over the course of the 17th through 19th centuries, a period of dramatic political transformation on the Bight of Benin. Archaeological excavations within the domestic quarters of a series of Dahomean royal palace sites have yielded diverse faunal and ceramic assemblages that represent clear examples of 1) ritualized food consumption and 2) everyday culinary practices. In this paper, faunal and ceramic evidence from two excavated contexts is marshaled to distinguish the archaeological signatures of feasting in Dahomey, highlighting the importance of private feasts in attempts to build political influence in the domestic zones of Dahomean royal palaces. In particular, this analysis foregrounds how palace women jockeyed for power and influence during a period of political uncertainty.

This paper examines the incorporation of rum and gin as powerful spiritual drinks in pre-colonial Gold Coast, particularly in the context of state formation and warfare, and the growing importance of maize, side by side with the indigenous yam, as the food of gods. Through food and drink, we analyze changing notions of spiritual efficacy and the ascendancy of war deities, and we interrogate how shifts in socio-political contexts aligned with those in the spiritual realm. Why were European liquors like gin, rum, and schnapps incorporated into ritual on the Gold Coast and not others? We juxtapose geographically dispersed ritual landscapes, contrasting the Atlantic coast and its immediate hinterland with a case study from the northern Guan in our endeavor to understand how far-reaching were Atlantic processes, as well as the “logic” of ritual transformation.

In sub-Sahelian Africa, ironmaking is the oldest, most widespread and most important metallurgy that has been practised. Its trajectory, which is therefore long term – at least three millennia – declines with the importation of European iron from the 15th century and ends in the early 20th century. In the medieval period, when urbanisation, trans-Saharan trade, the arrival of Islam, and the founding and succession of kingdoms took place, iron production and use became widespread. This metal is no longer rare, and for several centuries it has replaced stone for agricultural and craft tools. It is traded in raw form or already transformed into objects. But what is the real place of this human activity in the development of societies? Is it central or peripheral? Is it an economic, political or societal issue for the powers that be? Does the place of iron production differ according to the type of political regime?Beyond the analysis of strictly technical questions related to iron production, paleometallurgy allows us to address more general questions in an original way. Fluctuations in the production and consumption of metals and metal objects offer the opportunity to question the needs of a population and thus to approach demography and settlement dynamics. The location of the production sites of raw materials, raw or manufactured products reflects the system of networks and control in which technical activities and exchanges take place. The circuits, the nature of the products and the identity of the actors of this activity can then be reconstructed.In this paper, a research project will be presented with the aim of collecting all the archaeological occurrences on the production and use of iron in order to re-interrogate, century after century, the relationship between the production of iron and the different political hegemonies that have crossed time and space. Using retrospective maps, we will follow the impact of the iron industry on the lives and activities of medieval populations. This re-exploitation of archaeological data will also make it possible to visualise the geographical, chronological and methodological gaps to be filled in order to fully achieve the restitution of the history of iron. In order to test the validity and relevance of the approach, we delimited a study area. This covers 1.5 million km2 and includes part of Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo and Benin. In this area and in this article, we will attempt to understand more specifically the successive issues of the relationship between the iron industry and the West African kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, Songhay, Gao and Mossi.

Flat griddle plates used for baking flatbreads are found in various regions across northern Africa. Morphologically similar cooking implements have been recovered in early Iron Age settlements of Sudan and Ethiopia. The paper discusses the archaeological evidence from Sudan which attests to a widespread use of ceramic griddles for the past 2500 years, about a thousand years earlier than previously thought. As the baking of bread occupies a special place in African food preparation techniques, the early use of griddles in Sudan has sparked debate on the emergence of this cooking technique in Africa: whether it was an indigenous innovation or an adoption from abroad.An ethno-archaeological case study on current griddle cooking in Sudan examines the operational sequence, the tools and social circumstances involved in the baking of flatbreads on griddle plates, locally called doka. Revealing close parallels to the finds from the early Iron Age, traditional griddle cooking provides a chance to better contextualise the use of similar kitchen utensils in the past.

This paper compares two fields of analysis: on the one hand, hydrosociology, theorized by geographers and anthropologists, which conceptualizes the uses and landscapes of water as a reflection of the social organization of the group; on the other hand, hydraulic archaeology, developed by archaeologists and historians, which has demonstrated the permanence of ancient hydraulic structures in contemporary landscapes. The aim of this cross-disciplinary approach is to produce a social interpretation of the ancient irrigation systems fossilized in current agricultural plots, in order to produce a diachronic analysis of social organizations that have disappeared. The case study of this contribution deals with the medieval city of Sijilmasa (Morocco) and the Saharan oasis of Tafilalt that still surrounds the archaeological site today. This study of sub-contemporary oasis hydraulics has made it possible to historicize its development over the long term and to highlight a clear correlation between the successive implementations of different irrigation practices and the evolution of the socio-political organization of the Tafilalt population over the centuries. Corroborated by textual sources, this model could be applied in the future to other medieval Saharan oases for which no written or archaeological record remains and whose social organization is otherwise unknown.