Trans-Saharan Trade
Senior 1 · History and Citizenship
Trans-Saharan Trade
Lesson 2 of 5
25 min
In March 1352, twenty-five days after leaving Sijilmasa, Ibn Battuta's caravan reached the middle of the desert. Read what he saw there.
"After twenty-five days we reached Taghaza, an unattractive village, with the curious feature that its houses and mosques are built of blocks of salt, roofed with camel skins. There are no trees there, nothing but sand. In the sand is a salt mine; they dig for the salt, and find it in thick slabs, lying one on top of the other … A camel will carry two of these slabs. No one lives at Taghaza except the slaves of the Massufa tribe, who dig for the salt … At Iwalatan a load of salt brings eight to ten mithqals; in the town of Malli it sells for twenty to thirty, and sometimes as much as forty. The [people of these lands] use salt as a medium of exchange, just as gold and silver is used [elsewhere]; they cut it up into pieces and buy and sell with it."
Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa 1325–1354, translated by H. A. R. Gibb (London, 1929), pp. 317–318. Public domain.
Reading notes: Iwalatan is Walata. Malli is the capital city of the Mali Empire, whose exact site historians still debate. A mithqal is a weight of gold, about 4.25 g. The words in square brackets were added by Ganzaa: the 1929 translation uses a term for Black Africans that is offensive today.
Definition
Medium of exchange: anything that people accept in payment for goods and services, so that they do not have to barter one good directly for another. Coins and banknotes are the most common one today. Example: blocks of salt in the Mali Empire, or cowrie shells in Timbuktu.
Definition
Export and import: an export is a good sold and sent out of a region; an import is a good brought into a region from outside. Example: gold was West Africa's main export across the Sahara; salt was its main import.
Worked example: what do Ibn Battuta's prices tell us?
Gold and salt were the heart of the trade, but caravans carried many other goods. Study the table and notice that each side sold what the other side lacked.
| Direction | Goods | Where they came from | What buyers used them for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Southbound, into West Africa | salt | desert mines: Taghaza, later Taoudenni; Bilma | diet, preserving food, and as a medium of exchange |
| horses | North Africa | cavalry for the armies of West African kings | |
| cloth: wool, silk, linen | North Africa, Egypt, Europe | fine clothing for rulers and merchants | |
| copper and brass | the Sahara and North Africa | jewellery, vessels, and small money | |
| books and paper | North Africa, Egypt, Spain | Islamic schools and scholars | |
| glass beads, cowrie shells, dates, swords | North Africa; cowries from the Indian Ocean | ornaments, small money, food, weapons | |
| Northbound, out of West Africa | gold dust and gold bars | Bambuk, Bure, the Akan forest | coins in North Africa and Europe |
| ivory | elephant tusks from the savanna and forest | carvings and luxury goods | |
| hides and leather goods | cattle, goats and sheep of the Sahel | shoes, bags, bookbindings | |
| enslaved people | captives taken in wars and raids | forced labour as servants, soldiers and workers in North Africa and beyond |
The last row is different from all the others. Enslaved people were human beings, not goods, even though traders bought and sold them as property. The historian John Wright estimates that between 6 and 7 million people were taken across the Sahara into slavery over about 1,250 years, most of them in the later centuries of the trade. Their suffering is as much a part of this trade's history as the gold.
Figure 2 turns Ibn Battuta's account into a time strip. It shows that a crossing was a series of long marches between the few places with water.
The dangers were thirst, heat, sandstorms, getting lost, and raids by armed groups, so a caravan's guide and its planning decided whether its people lived or died.
Warning
A common mistake: you may read that salt was traded "weight for weight" for gold. That is an exaggeration. Ibn Battuta's prices show that a camel load of salt, two big slabs, cost 8 to 40 mithqals of gold, that is about 34 g to 170 g (). Salt was valuable, but a camel load of salt was worth only a small pouch of gold.
Important
The trade you are studying has not completely vanished. Salt is still dug by hand at Taoudenni, in the far north of Mali, and camel caravans, known as the azalai, still carry the slabs about 20 days south to Timbuktu. From there, boats on the Niger take them to river ports such as Mopti. In Niger, a similar caravan route runs between Agadez and the salt town of Bilma. Most of the old routes no longer see camels, but for a few Tuareg families these journeys remain a living tradition that is more than a thousand years old.
Salt was valued in Rwanda too: as you saw in Unit 5, it was one of the goods Rwandans obtained by barter in the pre-colonial period. A good that is cheap where it is produced can be precious far away.
National Geographic: "Salt Mines of Mali". Watch how the slabs are cut from the ground and loaded onto camels, and compare the work with Ibn Battuta's description of Taghaza.
Class discussion: Today a packet of salt costs very little in any Rwandan shop. In 1352 a camel load was worth dozens of grams of gold in Mali. What made salt so precious there and then? Can you name a good that is cheap in one place today but expensive in another, and explain why?
Practice
Sources and credits
The rest of this lesson, its diagrams, tables, worked examples and practice items, and the unit exercises were written by Ganzaa.
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
