The six African countries that produce the most gold (South Africa, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Zimbabwe and Sudan) exported in 2021 a total of 46.5 billion dollars of the precious metal. Both Mali, Sudan and Burkina Faso depend on gold as a fundamental resource for their economic survival but, in turn, these three nations are today at war or live in serious armed conflicts. Gold in sub-Saharan Africa has been from the beginning of its lyrics a source of wealth with no apparent bottom but also a recurring ingredient in the conflicts that have been shaking it since the first man killed with a stone. One could not understand the potential of the south of the Sahara, nor many of the problems that plague it, without first understanding the role that gold plays in the lives of millions of people and their ancestors before them.
First of all, it would be necessary to go back to the years before colonization. It should be remembered that not a few african nationalisms that gave birth to the States formed in the second half of the 20th century come precisely from African kingdoms and empires where gold was a source, not only of wealth, but also of national pride and power.
the niger basin
The Mali Empire is an excellent example to understand the link between gold and nationalism. Between the 13th and 14th centuries, a kingdom began to fortify itself on the banks of the Niger River, which a few years later would occupy what we know today as a large part of Mali, Senegal, and northeastern Guinea Conakry. The strong point of the Malian Empire was none other than gold. This metal had already been crucial in the development of civilizations along the flow of the Niger and its surroundings, as it could be the city-state of Takrur in the north of present-day Senegal. But it was during the Malian period that the fame of the wealth of the Sahel reached the international scene.
The name of the Emperor Mansa Musa still echoes in the voices of the descendants of this Empire. No one has forgotten that he brought architects from Granada to build mosques in Timbuktunor that on his way through Egypt during his pilgrimage to Mecca he distributed so much gold that devalued the price of metal in the country of the pharaohs and caused an economic crisis which lasted several years. The Malians tell it today between laughs, remembering, perhaps with a certain nostalgia, the times when they were so powerful that their mere gifts unbalanced the other end of Africa.
Gold as a channel for Islam
So gold in Mali didn’t feel like it does now. Nor in Zimbabwe. This other kingdom in southern Africa accumulated wealth and power in the Middle Ages thanks to the gold and ivory trade, which it sold to the Arabs settled on the island of Zanzibar and northern Mozambique. Because It was the Arabs who established the first commercial exchanges with the aforementioned territories, before the European participation initiated by Portugal at the end of the Middle Ages. The opening of trade routes in the Sahel and directed to the coasts of southern Africa benefited Arabs and Africans alike.
The first were supplied with gold, ivory and slaves captured in the enemy kingdoms; In exchange, they provided the Africans with silks, spices and technology that would allow them to build buildings that still stand today, such as the walled structures of Great Zimbabwe.
To round off this exchange, the trade routes of southern Africa and the Sahel allowed the gradual introduction of Islam on the continent. A quick look at the African religious map shows that the coastal areas of Tanzania and Mozambique, as well as Sudan and the Sahel, are currently Muslim-majority despite evangelization after the fact during colonialism. There is no doubt that religions in Africa would not be the same today if the aforementioned exchanges did not exist and where gold, this metal prone to deception, was the great protagonist along with slaves and salt.
Axum and King Solomon
Gold creates and destroys. Before the empires of Mali and Zimbabwe arose, a tiny mountainous region in northern Ethiopia became known for the gold it hid among its rocks. tigray lives now the consequences of a war that has lasted two years (2020-2022) and that has claimed the lives of 600,000 people, but in the first centuries of our era it was part of the rich kingdom of axum. Roman and Greek texts speak of this kingdom whose existence, although certain, sometimes straddles between myth and reality, and whose vestiges are still preserved in some of the best-known ruins in northern Ethiopia.
Ethiopian legends claim that King Solomon traveled here to meet the legendary Queen of Sheba, with which he would father a bastard son that would give rise to the Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia. That genealogy ruled the African country uninterrupted until the establishment of the republic in 1975. But Axum’s wealth peaked long before the overthrow of the Rasta Fari, back as far back as the fourth century. He then exported obsidian, gold, ivory and aromatic resins to Rome and India, importing silk and spices in return.
Although the kingdom of Axum disappeared millennia ago, the undertow of his power remains embedded in the ideals of the tigranians, who refuse to accept the precarious reality that subjugates them and fight conscientiously to recover their influence in the area. The last attempt to return to the glorious past occurred in the Tigray War, a humanitarian catastrophe where gold was neither seen nor touched (Tigray’s mineral reserves in industrial quantities were depleted around the fifth century), but where the wealth of Axum was still remembered as an unrepeatable dream after awakening.
Just as a Muslim Sahel could not be conceived without the presence of gold, one would not understand the extensive cultural wealth of Ethiopia without first looking towards Axum, and Axum would not have gone from being a minor kingdom with a desire for greatness if it were not for the gold that allowed him to face payments to soldiers and foreign merchants.
The legend of Hanno the Navigator
Axum, Zimbabwe and Mali, but also the Songhai empire used gold as a foothold to accumulate power in their respective areas of influence. Even the ancient Egyptians exploited the gold reserves in Nubia (present-day Sudan), a region whose wealth thanks to gold reached the point where a pharaonic dynasty, today known as “the black pharaohs”, temporarily ousted the full-blooded Egyptian pharaohs from power. The black pharaohs of Nubia and their moneyed class survive today through the pyramidsbecause it is Sudan, and not Egypt, the country with the greatest number of constructions of this type (2,000 pyramids in better or worse condition dot the Sudanese desert compared to the 200 that Egypt conserves).
It turns out that building them became too expensive for the Egyptians; but the price was not a problem for the wealthy Nubians. In fact, some historians have determined that The word “nubia” comes from the word “gold” according to the ancient Egyptian dialects; such is the influence that metal had at this time.
The Greek Herodotus already mentioned in his chronicles the extensive gold trade on the coasts of West Africa, which he defined as cautious for fear of cheating and theft. And an ancient Greek writing speaks of a Carthaginian named Hannon the Navigator. It is assumed that this explorer of the fifth century BC. C arrived at the shores of present-day Gabon in order to found cities of Libyans and Phoenicians on the shores of the Atlantic and also to establish a trade route that supplied Carthage with gold. Whether Hannon’s journey is true or not, the evidence of gold in sub-Saharan Africa that originated in ancient times gave way to a time of frantic exports during the Middle Ages: some sources determine that only in West Africa was traded then with a 10 % of world gold.
With the arrival of Europeans in the sub-Saharan scene, the principles of commercial cooperation and territorial respect that characterized medieval trade between Arabs and Africans began to break down. The call of gold and the riches that accompanied it became too strong for the Portuguese, French and English who began the colonial era, after a first stage where the Western presence was limited to the creation or conquest of a few coastal cities that allowed to export goods and slaves.
Centuries-old empires crumbled from the 17th century and any option for the continent to participate in the development race dissipated before it began, victims as they were of the incomprehensible European treaties and the force of their weapons. And gold, which in Africa had until then been a source of wealth and pride for so many, became, one step at a time, the curse it is today.
