WESTERN AFRICA, HISTORY OF

history of the region from the 11th century to the present. A reasonable body of sources for the writing of western African history begins to be available from about AD 1000. Three centuries earlier, the Arabs had completed their conquest of Africa north of the Sahara and so came into possession of the northern termini of trade routes reaching across the desert to western Africa. The lively school of geographers and historians that flourished in the Muslim world from about the 9th to the 14th century thus secured access to growing amounts of information about what they called the bilad as-sudan, the territory of the black peoples south of the Sahara. Dominance of Tuareg and Berber tribes Principal kingdoms and peoples of western Africa, 17th19th century. The Moroccan occupation of the Niger Bend in 1591 meant that the domination of the western Sudan by Mande or Mande-inspired empiresGhana, Mali, Songhaiwhich had persisted for at least five centuries, was at last ended. The Songhai kings were pushed southeast into their original homeland of Dendi, farther down the Niger close to Borgu, and Mande political power was limited to the so-called Bambarai.e., pagankingdoms of Segu (Sgou) and, later, of Kaarta, upstream and to the west of Macina (see map). In and around the Niger Bend itself, the long-term effect of the Moroccan conquest was to open up the country to the Tuareg and Arabized Berber tribes of the Saharan fringes. By the middle of the 18th century the descendants of the Moroccan conquerors, who had settled down in the Niger Bend cities as a ruling caste, the Arma, had become tributary to the desert pastoralists. The same tribes operated, or at least profited from, the trans-Saharan trade, and some of them had acquired leading positions in western African Islam. The Kunta tribe of Arabized Berbers had become preeminent in both these respects by the 18th century. It dominated the salt trade to Timbuktu, and in the person of Sidi Mukhtar (died 1811) it had produced a spiritual leader so respected among the Muslims of the western Sudan that the Kunta were able to exercise on the quarrels between the pastoral tribes a mediating influence which was clearly to the general benefit of commerce and urban society. Mukhtar's position was due to qualities of learning and holiness that were in part personal but also in large measure due to his leading role in the Qadiriyah, one of the Muslim brotherhoods (tariqas) in which particular traditions of both sanctity and learning were passed on from teacher to teacher. These brotherhoods or religious orders had arisen with the growth, from about the 11th century onward, of mystical currents of Muslim thought (especially in eastern Islam, where the Qadiriyah had begun). Mysticism proved to be congenial to Berber society in North Africa (where the Tijaniyah order evolved in the 18th century), and from here the tariqa entered the Sahara, arriving in western Africa by the beginning of the 16th century. Hitherto Islam had been spread in western Africa essentially by merchants who, in order to secure their livelihood, chose to accommodate themselves and their religion within the pagan social and political framework that existed where they settledwhich for the most part was only in the towns. But with the coming of the tariqaof which the Qadiriyah was one of the first and, until the Tijaniyah began to advance in its tracks in the 19th century, certainly the foremostwestern Africa began to experience the growth of organized groups of devout Muslims who were both specifically trained and morally compelled to work toward a true Islamic society. Moreover, if the people and their rulers remained irresponsive or hostile, it was the Muslims' duty to preach the doctrine of conversion by force, through the jihad, divinely justified war or rebellion against rulers who were pagans or not true Muslims. This doctrine was particularly attractive to the Fulani, who, as has been seen, were scattered in stranger communities between the agricultural settlements throughout the western African savannas. As the wealth, organization, and power of agricultural and urban society increased, so there was less scope available for the free movement of the Fulani cattle and less freedom for their herdsmen. The Fulani were subject to increased pressures to pay rents, taxes, and services to the rulers of the settled communities who, from the Fulani point of view, were aliens who had no natural right to these things. Although the bulk of the Fulani were pagans, they were, as pastoralists, naturally open to influence from the Saharan pastoralists who were Muslims and among whom the tariqa had been established. The Fulani also had ethnic links with the long Islamized Tukulor of the far west, and they had a considerable and influential Muslim clerical class of their own. The Fulani clerics were thus particularly receptive to the doctrine of jihad and, throughout the Sudan, could ally themselves with considerable numbers of disgruntled and mobile pastoral kinsmen to make jihad a military reality. The first Fulani jihad Principal kingdoms and peoples of western Africa, 17th19th century. The earliest known Fulani jihad occurred in Bondu (see map), close to the Islamized Sngal valley, where in the second half of the 17th century Fulani clerics succeeded in taking over political power from local Mande rulers. Early in the following century, considerable numbers of Fulani began to do the same in alliance with the local Muslim Mande traders in the nearby Fouta Djallon. By about 1750 a Muslim theocracy had been erected whose leaders were soon engaged in organizing trade to the Upper Guinea coast on which European traders were active. In the second half of the 18th century the same pattern was repeated in the Fouta-Toro (now Fouta), the homeland of the Tukulor, for there, though the dispossessed rulers were Muslims, as a group they were too self-interested and exploitative to suit the clerics. News of these developments in the westernmost Sudan naturally spread through the Fulani diaspora to more easterly territories influenced by the teaching of Sidi Mukhtar and other like-minded tariqa divines. In 1804 the most famous of the western African jihads was launched in Hausaland by Usman dan Fodio. Additional reading Much original work is available only in articles in such journals as Journal of African History (3/yr.); The International Journal of African Historical Studies (quarterly); History in Africa (annual); African Affairs (quarterly); and The Journal of Modern African Studies (quarterly). The standard work is J.F. Ade Ajayi and Michael Crowder (eds.), History of West Africa, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (197687). In addition there are the western African chapters with comprehensive bibliographies and bibliographical essays in J.D. Fage and Roland Oliver (eds.), The Cambridge History of Africa, 8 vol. (197586); and there are some stimulating contributions in UNESCO International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, General History of Africa (1981 ), but its bibliographies are less reliable. Useful atlases include J.D. Fage, An Atlas of African History, 2nd ed. (1978); and J.F. Ade Ajayi and Michael Crowder (eds.), Historical Atlas of Africa (1985). A short handbook is J.D. Fage, A History of West Africa, 4th ed. (1969); while Anthony Atmore and Gillian Stacey, Black Kingdoms, Black Peoples (1979), is a well-illustrated introduction to West African history, peoples, and cultures.For French-speaking territories, Jean Suret-Canale, French Colonialism in Tropical Africa, 19001945 (1971; originally published in French, 1964), contains useful material; and John D. Hargreaves, West Africa, the Former French States (1967), is an excellent short study. Ronald H. Chilcote, Portuguese Africa (1967), is a useful general work. Raymond Mauny, Tableau gographique de l'Ouest africain au Moyen ge (1961), contains much useful information up to about AD 1400, though it should be supplemented by later research, such as Nehemiah Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (1973, reprinted 1980). Other useful works for the pre-jihad history of the western and central Sudan are the classic works by E.W. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors, 2nd ed. rev. by Robin Hallett (1968); and Charles Monteil, Les Empires du Mali (1930, reissued 1968).Three works on the early history of Guinea may be recommended: J.D. Fage, Upper and Lower Guinea, ch. 6 in The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 3, pp. 463518 (1977); Frank Willett, Ife in the History of West African Sculpture (1967); and Robert Smith, Kingdoms of the Yoruba, 3rd ed. (1988). The coming of the European traders to the Guinea Coast is treated in John W. Blake, West Africa: Quest for God and Gold, 14541578, 2nd ed. rev. and enlarged (1977). Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade (1969), provided an innovative analysis; but the basic data have been reworked in a useful general history, Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery (1983). The subsequent history of Guinea has occasioned many important monographs, such as John Vogt, Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 14691682 (1979); Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 15451800 (1970, reprinted 1982); A.F.C. Ryder, Benin and the Europeans, 14851897 (1969); Ray A. Kea, Settlements, Trade, and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast (1982); Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa (1975); David Northrup, Trade Without Rulers: Pre-colonial Economic Development in South-eastern Nigeria (1978); and Robin Law, The Oyo Empire, c. 1600c. 1836 (1977). Peter B. Clarke, West Africa and Islam (1982), is a useful introductory work, covering the 8th to the 20th century. For the great outburst of Islam in western Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries, see Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate (1967, reprinted 1977); and David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal: The Western Sudan in the Mid-nineteenth Century (1985).The growth of European influence is covered in works such as Robin Hallet, The Penetration of Africa: European Exploration in North and West Africa to 1815 (1965); A. Adu Boahen, Britain, the Sahara, and the Western Sudan, 17881861 (1964); Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 17801850 (1964, reissued 1973); K. Onwuka Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 18301885 (1956, reprinted 1981); Bernard Schnapper, La Politique et le commerce franais dans le Golfe de Guine, de 1838 1871 (1961); and J.F. Ade Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria, 18411891 (1965). For the European partition of western Africa, the standard works are John D. Hargreaves, Prelude to the Partition of West Africa (1963), and West Africa Partitioned, 2 vol. (197485); but see also Henri Brunschwig, French Colonialism, 18711914 (1966; originally published in French, 1960); and A.S. Kanya-Forstner, The Conquest of the Western Sudan (1969).For the colonial period, two contemporary studies are invaluable: Lord Hailey (William Malcolm Hailey), An African Survey, rev. ed. (1957, reprinted 1968); and S. Herbert Frankel, Capital Investment in Africa (1938, reprinted 1969). For indirect rule, Margery Perham, Native Administration in Nigeria (1937, reprinted 1962), is a classic. A general synthesis is provided by Michael Crowder, West Africa Under Colonial Rule (1968); see also Michael Crowder and Obaro Ikime (eds.), West African Chiefs: Their Changing Status Under Colonial Rule (1970); and Michael Crowder (ed.), West African Resistance: The Military Response to Colonial Occupation, new ed. (1978). The chapters on western Africa in L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan (eds.), Colonialism in Africa, 18701960, vol. 12 (196970), are often extremely valuable. There is much useful material in two collections: Prosser Gifford and Wm. Roger Louis (eds.), Britain and Germany in Africa (1967), and France and Britain in Africa (1971).Works dealing with the transition to independence include John D. Hargreaves, The End of Colonial Rule in West Africa (1979), and Decolonization in Africa (1988); Ken Post, The New States of West Africa, rev. ed. (1968); Ruth Schachter Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-speaking West Africa (1964); Prosser Gifford and Wm. Roger Louis (eds.), The Transfer of Power in Africa: Decolonization, 19401960 (1982); and Edward Mortimer, France and the Africans, 19441960 (1969).General works on the period since independence include overviews in vol. 8 of The Cambridge History of Africa (1986). Treatments of politics include John Dunn (ed.), West African States: Failure and Promise (1978); and Patrick Chabal (ed.), Political Domination in Africa (1986). For the Francophone states, a good recent survey is Patrick Manning, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 18801985 (1988). No comparable survey exists for the Anglophone states, but see Peter Duignan and Robert H. Jackson (eds.), Politics and Government in African States, 19601985 (1986). An introduction to the Lusophone states is Basil Davidson, No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky (1981), on Guinea and Cape Verde. For recent events, the weekly West Africa is indispensable. John D. Fage T.C. McCaskie Colonization The European scramble to partition and occupy African territory is often treated as a peripheral aspect of the political and economic rivalries that developed between the new industrial nations in Europe itself and that were particularly acute from about 1870 to 1914. Its opening has commonly been taken to be either the French reaction to the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 or the Congo basin rivalry between agents of France and of Leopold II of the Belgians that led to the Berlin West Africa Conference of 188485, both of which are seen as being exploited by Bismarck for purposes of his European policy. Effect of local conditions European penetration into western Africa in the late 19th century. In western Africa, however, it seems fair to say that the beginnings of the scramble and partition were evident at least a generation before the 1880s and that they were determined by the local situation as much as or more than they were by European domestic rivalries. Already during 185474, the logic of the situation in western Africa had led France and Britain to take the political initiatives of creating formal European colonies in Senegal, in Lagos, and in the Gold Coast. All along the coast, in fact, the traditional African political order was becoming ineffective in the face of European economic and social pressures. For most of the 19th century these pressures had been predominantly British, but in the 1870s French companies began to offer effective competition to the British traders not only in Upper Guinea, where they had always been strong, but also on the Ivory Coast, in the ports immediately to the west of Lagos, and even in the lower river and delta of the Niger (see map). An unstable situation was developing in which the European traders were likely to call for further intervention and support from their governments, and especially so if the terms of trade were to turn against them. Low world prices for primary produce during the depression years from the 1870s to the mid-1890s certainly caused difficulties for Europeans trading to western Africa and led them to think that an increase in European control there would enable them to secure its produce more cheaply. The changing balance of power in western Africa was not confined to the coastlands. By the 1870s formal French and British armies had already ventured into the interior and had inflicted defeats on such major African powers as those of al-Hajj 'Umar and Asante. In 1879 Faidherbe's heirs on the Sngal River had launched the thrust that was to take French arms conquering eastward across the Sudan to Lake Chad and beyond. By the end of the 1870s France and Britain, therefore, were already on the march in western Africa. The principal effect of the new forces stemming from domestic power rivalries in Europe itselfthe most dramatic of which was the appearance in 1884 of the German flag on the Togoland coast, between the Gold Coast and Dahomey, and in the Cameroonswas to intensify and to accelerate existing French and British tendencies to exert their political and military authority at the expense of traditional African rulers. The beginnings of European activity The arrival of European sea traders at the Guinea coastlands in the 15th century clearly marks a new epoch in their history and in the history of all of western Africa. The pioneers were the Portuguese, southwestern Europeans with the necessary knowledge, experience, and national purpose to embark on the enterprise of developing oceanic trade routes with Africa and Asia. Their main goals were in Asia, but to reach Asia it was necessary to circumnavigate Africa, in the process of which they hoped, among other things, to make contact with Mali and to divert some of the trans-Saharan gold trade from Muslim North Africa to Christian Europe. The colonization of the Cape Verde Islands, from the 1460s onward, provided bases for trade with the fringes of the Mali empire. The most momentous discovery in western Africa, however, came in 1471, when Portuguese captains first reached the coast of modern Ghana between the mouths of the Ankobra and Volta rivers. It was quickly appreciated that the Akan peoples of this coast had access to supplies of gold, which were plentiful by contemporary European standards, and that they were willing and organized to trade some of this gold for base metals, cloth, and other manufactures. The Portuguese called this coast Mina, the mine, while in European languages generally it became known as the Gold Coast. The wealth obtainable from trade with the Gold Coast was so important for the completion of the Portuguese design to establish regular commerce with Asia by circumnavigating Africa that the Portuguese crown quickly took steps to exclude foreign rivals from the western African trade and to bring it under its direct control. Portugal was not a naturally wealthy nation, however, and its overseas interests had become very widely extended by the beginning of the 16th century. The western African coastlands and their trade were only one element in a system that also embraced the Congo and Angola, Brazil, the East African littoral, and India and the East Indies. By and large it was the trade of the latter that was regarded as the major prize, and elsewhere activities tended to be restricted to those which might strengthen the prosperity of the overseas enterprise as a whole without unduly straining the limited resources, especially perhaps of labour, available for its control and exploitation. The general strategy in western Africaas elsewhere in the Portuguese trading empirewas to keep territorial and administrative commitments to the minimum necessary to develop and benefit Portuguese commercial activities that were already in existence. The main interest in western Africa was the gold trade of Mina, and it was thereand virtually there alonethat the Portuguese endeavoured to maintain a positive presence on the mainland. In 1482 they built the strong fort that they called So Jorge da Mina (the modern Elmina Castle) on the shores of the Gold Coast, on land leased from the local Akan, and in subsequent years this was supplemented by the construction of three additional forts, at Axim, Shama, and Accra. The purpose of these forts and their garrisons was to try to ensure that the local people sold their gold only to agents of the Portuguese crown. No other Europeans succeeded in establishing lasting footholds on the Gold Coast before the close of the 16th century, and the Portuguese purpose was largely achieved. The surviving records suggest that up to about 1550 the Portuguese were securing from the Gold Coast on average at least 12,400 ounces of gold each year, a sizable proportion of the production then available to Europe. In exchange, the Gold Coast peoples needed to be supplied with commodities they desired, and this presented Portugal with a problem, as it was not a major manufacturing nation. The raw iron and copper, metal goods, cloth, and other items that were in demand on the Gold Coast had to be purchased elsewhere. Some of the cloth exported to the Gold Coast was in fact brought from Morocco (and may therefore have been in competition with a trade in cloth that had earlier reached the Akan from the north), and the requirements of their Gold Coast customers were a prime factor in leading the Portuguese to develop relations with the kingdom of Benin and the Niger delta, where further supplies of cloth, and also of beads and slaves that were in demand on the Gold Coast, could be obtained. At first the Portuguese hoped to control the trade of Benin and surrounding areas by converting the kingdom, or at least its court, to Christianity and turning it into a satellite protectorate of their empire. Although this kind of policy was initially successful elsewhere in Africa, notably in the Kongo (Bakongo) kingdom of northern Angola, the Benin monarchy was powerful enough to reject European pressures and infiltration. From about 1520 onward, the Portuguese were virtually excluded from Benin, and their trade with the Niger delta was conducted from So Tom and from the other islands of the Gulf of Guinea that they had colonized. This trade was principally in slaves, from the Congo and Angola as well as from the delta, who were employed on plantations to grow tropical produce, sugar in particular, for the European market. Apart from an abortive attempt to intercept the western trans-Saharan trade from a fort that was erected on the island of Arguin off the coast of Mauritania, the other principal Portuguese activity in western Africa was the trade with the coastlands of Upper Guinea that was conducted by the settlers on the Cape Verde Islands (which, together with Madeira, were also developed as plantation colonies employing African slave labour). The empire of Mali was in decline, but the Portuguese were not strong enough to control trade so far into the interior. What ultimately developed, on the creeks and islands of the coast from the Gambia to Sierra Leone, was a number of informal settlements where traders from the Cape Verde Islands did some trade with Mande merchants and with the local peoples. Gradually they married into the local trading and ruling families and, escaping formal Portuguese control, became agents of the African commercial system who sought to secure the best terms they could from any visiting European trader irrespective of nationality. It may be doubted whether this first period of European involvement with western Africa, from about 1450 to 1600, had much effect on the course of its history. The only Europeans consistently involved were the Portuguese, who were not strong outside the Gold Coast and who were really only interested in controlling some aspects of trade, and these only in a few selected areas of the coastlands where new opportunities had been opened up for a few members of the ruling and trading classes. Perhaps the main changes were that a few Africans acquired some acquaintance with Christianity and with elements of the Portuguese languagea pidgin variety of which became the lingua franca of coastal commerce for some centuriesand that western African farmers were introduced to some new crops and fruits, usually of tropical American provenance, which they quickly adopted if they were more productive than their established cultigens. For example, corn (maize) was more productive than millet and cassava more productive than yams under certain conditions. The new era of maritime intercourse with the outside world was probably of marked significance only on the Gold Coast. There new avenues of wealth had been opened up for some of the Akan in trade at the coast. There too a new political problem had emerged of how to ensure regular and profitable commercial dealings with the Europeans, while at the same time preventing the coastal footholds, which the Europeans required as entrepts, from subverting the sovereignty of the indigenous states. This was a very real problem, because the coastal kingdoms were small and divided among themselves in competition for the trade with the Europeans. Elmina certainly, and to some extent Axim also, did in fact develop independent jurisdictions over the mixed European, African, and mulatto trading communities that developed beneath the walls of the forts. Beyond these, the difficulty of maintaining large and effective forces of European soldiers in the tropics meant that the Portuguese could only exert power through African allies. The coastal people were thus able to maintain the principle that the land on which the forts were built was not ceded, but only leased. If the Portuguese lost their allies' confidence, the latter could refuse to supply or help defend the forts, or even destroy them altogether (as happened for the first time at Accra in the 1570s). The rise of the Atlantic slave trade The coastal peoples generally, and those of the Gold Coast in particular, were certainly prepared to welcome the merchants of other European nations so as to decrease their dependence on the Portuguese. The first Europeans effectively to break into the Portuguese monopoly of sea trade with western Africa were the Dutch, who had been some of the principal distributors in northwestern Europe of the Asian, African, and American produce imported into Portugal and Spain. After the northern Netherlands had revolted against Spanish rule, however, and Philip II of Spain (who since 1580 had been king of Portugal also) had sought to punish the Dutch merchants by excluding them from the Iberian ports, they were stimulated to organize oceanic trading ventures of their own and from 1598 established on the Gold Coast the first Dutch trading posts in western Africa. The principal targets for Dutch aggression, however, were in the East Indies and in the Americas, and the effective assertion of Dutch power against Portugal in western Africa was a by-product of the success of the Dutch West India Company in destroying Spanish naval power in the Caribbean and in embarking on the conquest of the plantation colony that the Portuguese had established in Brazil. As a result, by the end of the 1630s the Dutch had established themselves as principal suppliers and customers of the Spanish plantations in the Caribbean, while in Brazil they were themselves in possession of a plantation colony. The production on American plantations of tropical produce, of which sugar was the most important, and especially the marketing of this produce in western Europe, were extremely profitable activities. But plantation agriculture in the tropics required large and regular supplies of cheap labour. America did not have these, but, just across the Atlantic, western Africa seemed to have relatively great quantities of productive labour. As early as the 1440s, the Portuguese had begun to transport some African slaves to supplement the meagre labour resources of their own country (especially of the southern provinces they had reconquered from the Moors), and their own plantations in Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands, and, ultimately, on the islands of the Gulf of Guinea had come to be dependent on African slave labour. The Spaniards, and subsequently other Europeans, in America thus naturally came to look to Africa to make good their labour shortage, and a slave trade to the Caribbean had commenced on a small scale in the 1520s. Spain had little in the way of trade in Africa itself, so the authorities gave out contracts for the supply of slaves to other merchants, and the ultimate suppliers were usually Portuguese. From the 1570s onward, Portugal's slave traders had a further American market in their own colony of Brazil. The large slave population on their Gulf of Guinea islands was getting out of control, with the result that many Portuguese planters were abandoning these islands and reestablishing their activities in Brazil. By the time the Dutch West India Company entered the scene in the mid-1620s, in all probability about 400,000 slaves had been imported into the Americas, and the annual volume of imports had risen to about 10,000 a year. This was a sizable business compared with the earlier trades in African slaves to Europe (which had virtually ceased by the 1550s, when perhaps 50,000 slaves had been imported) or to the Atlantic and Gulf of Guinea islands (which by the 1620s had probably received rather more than 100,000 slaves, but whose imports were then less than 500 a year). The demand for slaves in the Americas was also beginning to increase rapidly. In the wake of the Dutch defeat of Spanish naval power, English and French colonists were beginning to settle the smaller Caribbean islands and were seeking to exploit their soils for tropical agriculture with as many slaves as possible, while Spanish official restrictions on the volume of slave imports in their territories were hardly effective. The labour needs of the plantations it had conquered in Brazil made it imperative that the Dutch West India Company should begin to secure slaves from Africa, and it very quickly recognized that the supply of slaves to European colonists elsewhere in the Americas was an extremely profitable business. To ensure its sources of supply, the Dutch company embarked on the conquest of all the Portuguese bases on the western African shores. Some of these, for example the island of So Tom in the Gulf of Guinea, were subsequently lost to it, but by 1642 the Dutch were firmly in possession of the Portuguese forts on the Gold Coast, and they dominated Europe's trade with western Africa from Cape Verde to the Niger delta. By the 1660s probably as many as 15,000 African slaves were being landed in the Americas each year. Nearly half of this trade was Portuguese, for this nation had by then recovered its possessions in both Brazil and Angola and had a near monopoly of the trade south of the equator, but the remainder, the growing part, was in northern European hands. The Dutch West India Company's activities in the Atlantic slave trade aroused interest throughout the ports of northwestern Europe, and soon merchants from France, Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia, as well as private Dutch traders, were competing with the Dutch company. French and British competition soon became of major importance. Both countries were resentful of the growing economic power of the Netherlands that was based on foreign trade, and both possessed colonies in the Americas. Their governments decided that their colonists should not be dependent on Dutch merchants for their supplies of labour (nor, for that matter, for capital or for the marketing of their produce in Europe). Through grants of monopolies of their nations' trade with western Africa or the West Indies, French and English merchants were encouraged to form companies strong enough to challenge the power of the Dutch West India Company, and these challenges were supported by the warships of their respective royal navies. Between 1652 and 1713 there was a succession of wars involving France, Britain, and the Netherlands. The main battles were usually fought far away from Africa, but throughout the period the traders of each nation sought to increase the number of their trading posts on the western African coast and to deny trade to their rivals. A large number of new forts was built, and these forts were constantly changing hands. Western Africa since independence Western Africa's political history since independence has been dominated by two factors. First, the hopes raised by political independence in many countries were not realized. National leaders clung to personal power and frustrated expectations of political evolution along democratic lines, with corruption, self-seeking, and a loss of political direction as a consequence. Dissatisfaction was commonly focused on the military, which in most states was the only institutionalized authority apart from the government. Since the 1960s western Africa has been characterized by a pattern of military coups. In some states successive coups have taken place as one military faction replaced another; in others, the army has intervened as periodically restored civilian regimes have failed. Second, the relative economic position of western Africa has seriously declined since independence. Government mismanagement has played a part, but significant underlying factors have played a larger role. At independence few states had the economic resources to satisfy popular expectation. Internationally approved, ambitious public- and private-sector industrial modernization programs were often ill-judged and harmful to the agricultural sector. A declining capacity to feed themselves led in many states to costly import substitution. At the same time, export crops were dependent on declining world market prices, and the price of imported oil rose spectacularly in the 1970s. Many states experienced chronic balance-of-trade deficits and incurred crippling international debts. In the 1970s and '80s drought and famine exacerbated the situation. A deepening indebtedness and difficult and prolonged negotiations with lending and rescheduling agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank resulted. Francophone countries In Senegal, Lopold Senghor, with strong French support, maintained power until his resignation in 1980 by balancing conflicting factions and promising controlled political liberalization. His nominated successor, Abdou Diouf, continued these general policies together with the link to France. In the 1980s Senegal experienced budget deficits and agreed to a program of fiscal restraint with the IMF and the World Bank. Cte d'Ivoire was ruled after independence by the strongly pro-French Flix Houphout-Boigny, who died during his seventh term in office in December 1993. A period of sustained economic growth, marked by significant foreign investment, ended in the 1980s. Cte d'Ivoire is sensitive to international commodity prices, and in 1987 it, too, agreed to a short-term policy of fiscal restraint with the IMF. In Guinea, Ahmed Skou Tour held power from independence in 1958 to his death in 1984. Initially he repudiated any connection with France and the Western powers. Guinea adopted a variant of international Marxism, experienced a number of internal political crises, and embraced economic policies that ran into trouble in the 1970s. Following Skou Tour's death, the army seized power. President Lansana Cont survived a coup attempt in 1985 and, with a ruined economy, accepted a stringent IMF and World Bank retrenchment program. The country's first multiparty elections were held in December 1993, but continuing economic hardship led to ongoing unrest within the country. In Cameroon, Ahmadou Ahidjo successfully created a unified state from French and British trusteeship territories, but his government became increasingly authoritarian. In 1979 there was a regional uprising, an attempted coup, and an upsurge of covert opposition from Anglophone elements. In 1982 Ahidjo resigned the presidency in favour of the prime minister, Paul Biya. In 1984 another coup attempt by the army was suppressed with considerable violence. Biya's reassertion of presidential authority thereafter was greatly assisted by access to oil revenues. Cameroon has experienced significant if sometimes fragile economic growth and has good economic prospects. Chad became independent in 1960. In 1975 the historic division between the Muslim north and non-Muslim south had erupted in violence. Prolonged warfare followed, in which France and Libya intervened. Chad remains a politically unstable country with major economic problems. In Mali, Modibo Keita was ousted by the army in 1968. The successor regime of General Moussa Traor was overthrown in 1991. A new constitution in 1992 established a secular, multiparty state. The 1980s and '90s have been dominated by chronic deficits in foreign trade and an economic crisis that was deepened by severe droughts. In Niger, Hamani Diori was removed in 1974 owing to the economic hardships that followed severe drought. His successor, Seyni Kountch, used uranium revenues to consolidate his rule, but by the time Kountch died in 1987, the uranium boom had ended. Subsequent leaders inherited an economy that was distressed by debt. A new constitution in 1992 allowed the country's first multiparty elections. Upper Volta experienced a series of coups as successive civilian and military regimes unsuccessfully grappled with a disabled economy. In 1983 Captain Thomas Sankara assumed power. He changed the name of the country to Burkina Faso in 1984. Sankara was a charismatic figure who undertook socialist agricultural initiatives. These foundered, but Sankara refused to approach the IMF. In 1987 he was assassinated and replaced by Captain Blaise Compaor. State capitalism replaced Sankara's socialism, and overtures were made to the IMF in an attempt to solve the chronic trade deficit. Dahomey, which changed its name to Benin in 1975, suffered five military coups until, in 1972, Major Mathieu Krkou seized power. Krkou's Marxist sympathies aroused widespread apathy and disillusionment. In the 1980s socialism was cautiously abandoned, and Benin was opened to foreign investment. In 1984 public-sector cuts were instituted under IMF oversight, but retrenchment alienated Benin's large educated elite and those with socialist leanings. In 1988, amid rumours of debt restructuring, there was an attempted coup. In Mauritania, the government of Moktar Ould Daddah was unable to cope with drought, poverty, and military confrontation with Algerian-supported Polisario Front nationalist guerrillas in Western Sahara (formerly Spanish Sahara). In 1978 it was replaced by the military, which concluded peace with the Polisario Front but became embroiled in hostilities with Morocco. In 1984 Colonel Maaouya Ould Sidi Ahmed Taya replaced Colonel Mohamed Khouna Ould Haidalla in a bloodless coup and restored diplomatic relations with Morocco. Throughout the 1980s the government was plagued by internal ethnic conflicts between black Africans and Muslims of Arab extraction. Despite valuable mineral and fish resources and aid from Saudi Arabia, Taya was forced to accept a debt rescheduling program from the IMF in 1985. In Togo, the army intervened twice in the 1960s, and since 1967 the country has been ruled by General Gnassingbe Eyadema. Togo benefited from phosphate revenues until this boom collapsed in the mid-1970s. From 1979 Togo periodically resorted to the IMF for help with economic stabilization and debt rescheduling. General Eyadema's tentative democratization was offset by a semiofficial personality cult that grew up around him. The land Geology Western Africa is underlain by crystalline rocks that outcrop over about 55 percent of the subcontinent, elsewhere being buried under sedimentary rocks. Volcanic rocks constitute a third, small group of surface rocks. The crystalline rocks, collectively referred to as the West African shield or craton, comprise three main types of rock assemblage. The basement complexes are highly deformed and contorted gneisses, migmatites (metamorphosed and banded mixed rocks), quartzites, and amphibolites. The supracrustal formations of phyllites, schists, banded ironstones, quartzites, and greenstones were originally laid down upon preexisting basement complexes as sedimentary and volcanic formations, but they have been folded, faulted, and metamorphosed during one or more episodes of orogenic deformation. The granitic intrusions, varying from several to hundreds of square miles in area, were intruded into basement complexes and supracrustals at the end of major tectonic events. The West African shield consists of three age provinces. The oldest part, whose assemblages are Archean with reactivation ages older than 2.5 billion years, lies in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea and is called the Liberian Craton. The central partin Cte d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Burkina Fasois dominated by the Birimian supracrustals, which were deposited during the Proterozoic era and tectonized in the Eburnian event of 1.8 to two billion years ago. In the east, beneath Benin, Togo, Nigeria, Chad, and Niger, the shield contains Archean-age basement complexes and Proterozoic supracrustals, which were deformed and the basement reactivated between 650 and 500 million years ago during the Pan-African thermotectonic event (see below). In the far west, the Rokelide and Mauritanide metamorphosed and deformed rocks of Guinea and Sierra Le