Africa's kingdoms left pyramids in Sudan, castles in Ethiopia, brass plaques in Nigeria and a granite tower in Zimbabwe that nobody can explain. These stories follow the gold and salt that paid for all of it, the rulers who spent it, and the travelers, treasure hunters and scholars who wrote it down or, in a few famous cases, got it badly wrong.
Every tile in a African Kingdoms game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Kingdoms
nine stories
1The kingdom that kept going after it lost Egypt
On the tile: Kush8th c. BC-4th c. AD
Kush is usually introduced as Egypt's neighbor upriver, in what is now Sudan, and for close to a century its kings ruled Egypt too. Assyrian armies pushed those Kushite pharaohs back south in the 660s BC, but the kingdom did not fold. Its heartland was the Island of Meroe, between the Nile and the Atbara, and Meroe became the rulers' principal residence. UNESCO counts Kush a major power from the 8th century BC to the 4th century AD, more than a thousand years in all.
Aksum grew rich on trade. Its fleets controlled the Red Sea commerce that ran through the port of Adulis, it commanded the ivory trade with Sudan, and it held the inland routes of northeastern Africa. UNESCO describes the kingdom as the most powerful state between the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia, sitting at the crossroads of Africa, Arabia and the Greco-Roman world. Its prestige outlived its power: long after the kingdom's political decline, Ethiopian emperors were still being crowned at Aksum.
Its own rulers called it Wagadu. The name that stuck, Ghana, came from the king's title. The empire sat between the Sahara and the headwaters of the Senegal and Niger, where gold from the south was traded for salt from the north. Goods were often taxed twice, coming in and going out, and the king kept every gold nugget for himself, leaving merchants the gold dust. The modern Republic of Ghana took the old empire's name but none of its land: the empire lay to the northwest, in what is now Mauritania and Mali.
Malinke tradition tells it this way. When Sumanguru of Kaniaga overran the small kingdom of Kangaba and killed the royal brothers, he spared one, a sickly boy who looked close to death anyway. The boy was Sundiata. What the record supports is the rest: he raised an army, beat Sumanguru at Kirina around 1235, razed Kumbi, the old capital of Ghana, in 1240, and moved his seat to Niani, where the gold trade turned a victory into an empire.
Songhai had swallowed Timbuktu, Djenne and the middle Niger. What finished it came across the Sahara from Morocco. In 1591 a Moroccan force of perhaps four thousand men, armed with guns, met a far larger Songhai army near Tondibi. By the account of a Timbuktu chronicle, the Songhai drove a thousand head of cattle at the Moroccan line to absorb the first volley, and the herd, frightened by the gunfire, fled back into their own ranks. The Songhai were routed at Tondibi, and then at Timbuktu and Gao.
In Shona, zimbabwe means houses of stone, and more than 150 major stone ruins are scattered across Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The greatest was the capital of a trading state that ran on cattle, crops and gold from the 11th to the 15th century and supported somewhere between ten and twenty thousand people. Excavators found glass beads and porcelain from China and Persia, and coins from Kilwa on the coast. The modern country is named for those ruins.
By the 15th century the oba of Benin was the supreme political, judicial, economic and spiritual leader of the Edo-speaking people, and he controlled all trade with outsiders. The artists of his court belonged to hereditary guilds, and their pecking order is telling: brass casters ranked highest, then blacksmiths, then carvers. The kingdom lay in what is now Nigeria, not in the modern Republic of Benin farther west along the coast. Its independence ended in 1897, when a British force captured Benin City.
8One family, seven centuries or more on the throne
On the tile: Kanem-Bornu9th-19th century
The Sef family held the throne around Lake Chad for more than seven centuries, and possibly closer to ten. Britannica dates the dynasty to about the middle of the 9th century; other historians start the Sef line with a king of the late 11th. Either way, it lasted until 1846. Along the way the court changed religion and lost a capital. A king took up Islam late in the 11th century; rivals drove the court out of Kanem late in the 14th, and it resettled west of the lake in Bornu, which is why the empire carries both names.
9Kumasi fell for a single day, and that was enough
On the tile: Asante18th c.-1902
Through the 18th and 19th centuries Asante held what is now southern Ghana, and its kings built a strong centralized state with a merit-based bureaucracy and a fine system of communications. In 1824 its army defeated a British force. In 1874 a British expedition under Sir Garnet Wolseley marched on Kumasi, the capital, and managed to occupy it for only one day. That was enough. The Asante were shocked to see how far their military and communications had fallen behind, and revolts broke out in the northern provinces. Asante became a British crown colony on January 1, 1902.
Piye ruled Kush from about 753 BC, upriver from Egypt in what is now Sudan, and his people were devoted to the Egyptian god Amon-Re. When a Libyan chieftain in the delta threatened Amon's home ground in Upper Egypt, Piye went north. He beat the Libyan river fleet, took Hermopolis and then Memphis, and collected the surrender of the delta's rulers. Then he did the surprising part: he sailed home to Mount Barkal with the spoils and left.
Taharqa reigned for twenty-six years as the fourth king of the 25th dynasty, and Assyria was his enemy from early in his reign to its end. Esarhaddon captured Memphis in 671 and installed his own administration; when the Assyrians withdrew, Taharqa came back down the Nile and destroyed their garrisons. Esarhaddon's son Ashurbanipal finally drove him out for good. He returned to Nubia, died there, and was buried under a large pyramid at Nuri, in what is now Sudan.
3A Roman emperor's head, buried under temple steps
On the tile: Amanirenas20s BC
When Rome annexed Egypt, Kush pushed back, and the kandake Amanirenas led the war. In the 20s BC Kushite forces raided north and carried home the bronze head of a larger than life statue of the emperor Augustus. Nobody melted it down. It was buried instead beneath the steps of a temple at Meroe, probably on purpose, so that the emperor would lie under the feet of everyone who entered. It stayed there until John Garstang's excavation found it in 1910. The war ended in a treaty historians read as favoring Meroe.
Ezana ruled Aksum in the fourth century and left his record cut into stone in three languages at once: Greek, Sabaean and Ge'ez. Historians still lean on those inscriptions. He also changed the kingdom's faith, by way of an unusual teacher. Frumentius, a Christian from Tyre, had been captured and put to work at the Aksumite court, where he became tutor to the young Ezana. Frumentius later went to Alexandria, came back a bishop, and baptized the king, and Christianity became Aksum's official religion.
Sonni Ali ruled Songhai for nearly thirty years and spent most of them in the field. He drove the Tuareg out of Timbuktu, which they had held since 1433, and he went after Jenne, a wealthy trading city on the Bani River near where it meets the Niger. Jenne sits in floodplain country, its houses raised on hillocks against the seasonal floods, and it did not come easily. His siege ran seven years before the city fell in 1473, and by 1476 Songhai dominated the lakes region of the middle Niger.
Askia Muhammad took the Songhai throne by battle in 1493 and then governed like an administrator. He divided the empire into provinces, organized a standing army and a fleet of war canoes, and created posts for finance, justice, the interior, agriculture, even waters and forests. He made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1496 and came home with the title of caliph. It ended badly. By his last years he had gone blind, and in 1528 his own son Musa overthrew him. He died at Gao in 1538, where the Tomb of Askia is now a World Heritage site.
In 1622 Njinga came to the Portuguese to negotiate peace on her brother's behalf. At the meeting, the famous account goes, the Portuguese had chairs and she was offered only a mat on the floor. She had one of her servants bend down to serve as her seat and spoke to the governor face to face, on the same level. She got her treaty. Decades of war and shifting alliances followed, and in a treaty of 1656 the Portuguese recognized her as ruler of Matamba, which she held until her death in 1663.
The quarrel came down to one article of a treaty. The Italian text said Ethiopia must conduct its foreign affairs through Italy; the Amharic text said only that it could if it chose. Menelik II repudiated the article, then the whole treaty, and Italy moved troops. On March 1, 1896, about 14,500 men under Italian command advanced on Adwa against an Ethiopian army of roughly 100,000 and were routed. The Treaty of Addis Ababa, signed that October, threw out the old treaty entirely, and Italy recognized Ethiopia's sovereign independence.
Asante tradition says the priest Okomfo Anokye brought a golden stool down from heaven, and that it holds the spirit of the whole nation. The history around the legend is plainer. Osei Tutu, chief of the small state of Kumasi, saw that the separate Asante kingdoms had to fuse to withstand their powerful Denkyera neighbors. The stool gave that union a spiritual basis as well as a practical one. The kingdoms merged, Osei Tutu led their combined forces to victory over Denkyera around 1701, and Asante roughly tripled in size during his reign.
Egypt gets the reputation, but the count goes the other way. The Kingdom of Kush left more than two hundred pyramids in what is now Sudan, by one count about twice as many as Egypt built. They look different too: smaller and much steeper, with the burial chambers set beneath them rather than built inside. From the third century BC onward most royal burials were made at Meroe, where the pyramids of Kushite rulers still stand crowded together among the semi-desert hills.
Giuseppe Ferlini was an Italian doctor serving with the Egyptian army, and in 1834 he set out for Meroe determined to come home with treasure. By his own account he dismantled five and possibly six pyramids stone by stone, including the tallest in the cemetery, Queen Amanishakheto's, which he leveled from the top down. He reported finding dozens of pieces of gold and silver jewelry in a chamber a little below its apex. Those pieces are now in Munich and Berlin. UNESCO's account of the site still names his treasure hunting as badly damaging some of the pyramids.
The stelae of Aksum are single blocks of stone raised to mark burials, the largest of them royal tombs. One, about 24 meters tall, had long since fallen and broken when Italian soldiers found it in 1935. In 1937 it was shipped to Rome in sections and stood there reassembled. Italy agreed in 1947 to give it back, then took another fifty-eight years to do it. The pieces flew home in April 2005, and the stele was standing again at Aksum in September 2008.
Most churches are built up. These were cut down. At Lalibela, masons carved eleven churches out of the living rock, generally by digging trenches to isolate a block and then shaping it outside and in, working from the top downward. Some stand entirely free of the rock; others stay joined to it on one side. Tunnels and trenches link them. Their building is attributed to King Lalibela, who set out to make a New Jerusalem after Muslim conquests halted Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land. One is believed to be the largest monolithic church in the world.
5The building the whole town replasters every year
On the tile: Djenne mosque1907
The Great Mosque of Djenne is built of sun-dried earth bricks and mud plaster, which the rains would erase if the town let them. The town does not let them. Every year the community mixes new plaster and recoats the walls, climbing on the bundles of palm sticks that project from the surface and serve as permanent scaffolding. A guild of masons has carried the technique down through generations. The present building went up in 1907 under Ismaila Traore, the head of that guild.
6A mosque rebuilt to the measurements of the Kaaba
On the tile: Sankore1578-1582
Timbuktu's Sankore mosque went up in the fourteenth or early fifteenth century and became the mosque most closely tied to teaching in the city, a place where scholars gathered students of their own. Between 1578 and 1582 the qadi of Timbuktu, Imam Al Aqib, had its sanctuary pulled down and rebuilt to one very particular specification: the dimensions of the Kaaba at Mecca. He was busy in those years. He also rebuilt and enlarged the Djingareyber mosque and restored the city's third great mosque, Sidi Yahia.
Inside the Great Enclosure at Great Zimbabwe, an inner wall runs alongside the outer one to make a narrow passage about fifty-five meters long, and at its end stands a conical tower of granite blocks. The tower is roughly ten meters high and five across, and nobody knows what it was for. One suggestion is a granary or a symbolic grain bin, since grain was a common form of tribute to Shona rulers. The walls around it were laid in regular courses of cut granite, in places more than five meters thick.
Kilwa Kisiwani is a small island off Tanzania that once handled a great deal of the Indian Ocean's trade, and its sultans built accordingly. Husuni Kubwa, put up between about 1310 and 1333, spread over some ten thousand square meters of coral stone, with an audience hall, a courtyard of tiered steps, storerooms taking up half the plan, and a large octagonal bathing pool. Down the shore, the Great Mosque's thirteenth-century dome was the biggest in East Africa until the nineteenth.
9Castles with battlements in the Ethiopian highlands
On the tile: Gondarfrom 1636
For centuries Ethiopia's rulers kept moving their royal camps, and the court had no fixed home. In 1636 the emperor Fasilidas settled at Gondar and made it a permanent capital. The camp hardened into a compound: a wall nine hundred meters long with twelve entrances, enclosing six major building complexes, among them castles, a library, a chancellery and a banqueting hall. The main castle has huge towers and battlemented walls that look, startlingly, like a piece of medieval Europe set down in the highlands.
The Benin Bronzes are mostly not bronze. They are brass, along with wood, ivory, leather and bone, made by hereditary guilds of the oba's court between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. The brass casters worked by the lost-wax method, and their memorial heads were designed as fittings: each has a hole in the top to take a carved elephant tusk. The palace plaques were nailed to the pillars of the court, though by 1897 they had been taken down and put in storage.
2Sculptures so lifelike a scholar credited Atlantis
On the tile: Ife headsc. 1300sMyth busted
In 1910 the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius was shown a cast head of startling realism at Ife, in what is now Nigeria, and could not accept that Africans had made it. His explanation was that survivors of Atlantis had brought Greek civilization to Africa; the Yoruba sea god Olokun, he decided, was really Poseidon. In 1938 more than a dozen more heads turned up, and by 1948 archaeologists had accepted the obvious answer. They are Yoruba work, cast in copper alloy by Ife artists centuries before Frobenius arrived.
Some eight centuries ago a goldsmith at Mapungubwe beat gold into thin sheets and fitted them over a wooden core to make a rhinoceros small enough to stand in the palm of a hand. It came from a royal grave on a sandstone hill near where the Shashe meets the Limpopo, in a kingdom that sent gold and ivory toward India and China and took glass beads and porcelain back. UNESCO calls Mapungubwe the largest kingdom in the subcontinent before it was abandoned in the fourteenth century.
Aksum was the first state in sub-Saharan Africa to mint its own coinage, and it struck in all three metals: gold for the international trade, silver and bronze for closer to home. The inscriptions are often in Greek, the language of the merchants Aksum dealt with, and later in Ge'ez. Early coins carry a disc and crescent; from the fourth century they carry a cross. Some silver pieces were inlaid with a little gold, presumably to raise their value.
Timbuktu's market dealt in salt from the desert mines at Teghaza, in gold, cattle and grain, and in one commodity people tend to forget: manuscripts. UNESCO counts the trade in manuscripts among the business of that market, and the traveler Leo Africanus reported in the early sixteenth century that books brought from North Africa sold there for more than any other merchandise. The Library of Congress, which exhibited a selection in 2003, dates the manuscripts it showed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and says they cover every aspect of human endeavor.
By the thirteenth century the merchants of Kilwa were dealing in gold, ivory, pearls, perfumes, Persian earthenware and Chinese porcelain, and much of the Indian Ocean trade passed through their hands. The porcelain was precious enough to display and plentiful enough to spend: masons pressed pieces of it into the white lime plaster of the walls and into the domes of the Great Mosque, so the buildings themselves were studded with imported china.
Oba Esigie of Benin created a new court title for his mother, Idia: iyoba, queen mother, and she became its first holder. Ivory pendants thought to have been carved for him, small enough to be worn at the hip, are believed to show her face, one of them crowned with a row of tiny bearded Portuguese heads. Four and a half centuries later Nigeria chose that pendant's face as the emblem of the festival of Black and African arts held in Lagos in 1977.
Meroe sat on the east bank of the Nile, with ironstone in the hills to its east, and its smelters fired their furnaces almost entirely with acacia charcoal. They left slag heaps big enough that archaeologists count the city among the largest ironmaking centers in Africa, and radiocarbon dates suggest iron was made there on a significant scale for more than a thousand years. Researchers argue that Kushite rulers held their territory partly through that iron. UNESCO counts the ironworks, along with the pyramids, temples and palaces, as evidence of the wealth and power of the Kushite state.
In the Buganda kingdom of southern Uganda, cloth comes off a tree. Craftsmen of the Ngonge clan, headed by a hereditary chief craftsman called the kaboggoza, harvest the inner bark of the mutuba tree in the wet season and beat it with wooden mallets until it turns soft, fine and an even terracotta color. The technique is prehistoric, older than weaving. Barkcloth for kings and chiefs is dyed white or black and worn in a different style to show their status. Cotton cloth brought by Arab caravan traders in the nineteenth century slowed production, but in recent years the craft has been strongly encouraged again in Buganda.