Sudan

The Sudan, not to be confused with the modern East African nation the Republic of the Sudan, is the geographic region south of the Sahara that was the home to several important early kingdoms including Ghana, Mali, and Songhai.

Originally taken from the Arabic phrase Bilal as-Sudan, meaning the “Southern Country” or the “Land of the Blacks,” Sudan referred to both a geographical and a cultural region. The dry, hot grasslands of the Sudan lay south of the vast Sahara, separating this ocean of sand from the forested regions bordering the Atlantic Ocean and the Bight of Benin. Agricultural peoples flourished in the Sudan, cultivating millet, wheat, sorghum, and, by the 16th century, cotton imported from India. In the region’s cities, where water was often more plentiful, melons, figs, citrus fruits, and grapes could be found. Millet and sorghum were the staples, each of them particularly suited to the local climatic and soil condition. Intense dry heat occasionally mitigated by seasonal rains, short growing seasons, and relatively poor soils made the cultivation of other grains and cereals untenable. Sorghums were more prevalent in the southern Sudan, where rainfall was heavier, about 25 to 50 inches annually, and millets predominated in the drier, northern region, where less than 25 inches of rain typically fell. Along the river valleys, including that of the Niger River, rice was an important crop. Farming in the Sudan was a family endeavor and, accordingly, a small one, with most farms ranging from two to eight acres. Irrigation provided some relief from the dry conditions, and wells were common in the savanna, particularly in those areas closest to the desert. Farmers in the Sudan practiced a complex system of agriculture, experimenting with various crops and using crop rotation systems in which certain plots of land would lay fallow, replenishing the soil’s nutrients.

Although agriculture was the economic and cultural basis for the majority of those living in the Sudan, the kingdoms that arose there based their power on other, more lucrative resources. gold, salt, and slavery formed the foundation of the early Sudanic empires. Indeed, North African traders knew the earliest of these ancient empires, Ghana, as the “land of gold.” Ghana and its successor, Mali, traded gold mined from the Bambara and Bure gold fields in the western Sudan for salt mined in and to the north of the Sahara. Control over the trans-Saharan trade route provided these kingdoms with enough wealth and power to become vast empires. Their participation in the trade had an additional result, one with dramatic and important social implications. Through the trans-Saharan trade came Islam. Before about A. D. 1100, the people of the Sudan practiced local traditional religions; afterward, beginning with the nobles and elites, the Sudanic empires increasingly adopted Islam as their official religion. Although the general populace of these empires took longer to convert to the new religion, by the mid-15th century Islam became the dominant religion.

The Sudan, with its intermediate location between the Sahara and the forests along the Atlantic, had a unique position in the history of Africa in the early modern period. It served as the gateway between North Africa and the southern empires, and between East and West African kingdoms. As a cultural and geographical region, it served as an important link in the trans-Saharan trade and in the spread of Islam.

Further reading: “A Very Long History,” in West Africa Before Colonization: A History to 1800, Basil Davidson, (London: Longman, 1998), 1-14; Robert W. July, Precolonial Africa: An Economic and Social History (New York: Scribner’s, 1975).

—Lisa M. Brady