The Blessed African Market: A Journey Through History

Africa has a long and rich economic history, dating back to the earliest human societies. From ancient trade routes and the rise of powerful kingdoms to the impact of colonialism and the ongoing struggle for economic independence, the story of African markets is a complex and fascinating one.

Trade Routes in Africa between 1000 and 1500 AD

Early Economic Activity and Trade

As soon as human societies came into existence, so did economic activity. Earliest humans were hunter gatherers living in small, family groups. Even then there was considerable trade that could cover long distances. Archaeologists have found evidence of trade in luxury items like metals and shells across the entirety of the continent. The main trades of the Berber people, lived in dry areas and became nomadic herders, while in the savannah grasslands, cultivated crops and thus permanent settlement were possible.

The first agriculture in Africa began around the Sahel and the south of the Sahara Desert, which in 5200 BC was far more moist and densely populated than today. Several native species were domesticated, most importantly pearl millet, sorghum and cowpeas, which spread through West Africa and the Sahel. North Africa took a very different route from the southern regions. Climatically it is linked to the Middle East and the Fertile Crescent, and the agricultural techniques of that region were adopted wholesale. This included a different set of crops, such as wheat, barley, and grapes. North Africa was also blessed by one of the richest agricultural regions in the world in the Nile River valley.

The drying of the Sahara created a formidable barrier between the northern and southern portions of the continent. Two important exceptions were Nubian Sudan, which was linked to Egypt by the Nile and Ethiopia, which could trade with the northern regions over the Red Sea. Powerful states grew up in these regions such as Kush in Nubia (modern day Northern Sudan and Southern Egypt) and Aksum in Ethiopia.

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The Bantu Expansion and the Arrival of New Crops

Ordinarily, in the sparsely populated areas, this same period saw the expansion of the Bantu speaking peoples. The Bantu expansion began in Southern Cameroon around 4000 years ago. Another factor may have been the arrival of southeast-Asian food crops, notably the AAB plantain, the cocoyam and the water-yam. Over the centuries the entire southern half of Africa was covered with the group, excluding only the Kalahari desert. The importation Bantu pastoralism reshaped the continent's economy.

Sometime in the first millennium, an equally important change began as crops began to arrive from Southeast Asia. The Indian Ocean has always been far more open to trade than the turbulent Atlantic and Pacific. Traders could ride the monsoon winds west early in the year and return east on them later. It is guessed that these crops first arrived in Madagascar, which also adopted Southeast Asian languages, sometime between AD 300 and 800. From the island, the crops crossed to African Great Lakes region.

The Rise of Cities and Empires

While some level of trade had been ongoing, the rise of cities and empires made it far more central to the African economy. North Africa was central to the trade of the entire Mediterranean region. The Greeks controlled much of the eastern trade, including along the Red Sea with Ethiopia. The Egyptian (and later, Roman) city of Alexandria (founded by Alexander the Great in 334 BC), was one of the hubs for Mediterranean trade for many centuries.

For most of the 1st millennium AD, the Axumite Kingdom in Ethiopia and Eritrea had a powerful navy and trading links reaching as far as the Byzantine Empire and India. On the east coast of the continent Swahili traders linked the region into an Indian Ocean trading network, bringing imports of Chinese pottery and Indian fabrics in exchange for gold, ivory, and slaves. Swahili Kingdoms created a prosperous trade empire, where occupied the territory of modern-day Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. In the interior of Africa, trade was far more limited. Low population densities made profitable commerce difficult.

The Impact of Islam and Trans-Saharan Trade

It was the arrival of the Islamic armies that transformed the economies of much of Africa. Though Islam had comparatively little impact on North Africa where large cities, literacy, and centralized states had been the norm, Muslims were far more effective at penetrating the Sahara than Christians had been. A series of states developed in the Sahel on the southern edge of the Sahara which made immense profits from trading across the Sahara. The main trade of these states was gold, which was plentiful in Guinea. Many wealthy empires grew around coastal areas or large rivers that served as part of important trade routes. The kingdoms of Mali and Songhai Empire grew along the Niger River between 1200 and 1590. Berber traders from the Sahel-a region south of the Sahara Desert-traded dates, copper, horses, weapons and cloth that they brought from north Africa in Camel trains.

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Trade with the Berber people, and other groups, drove the growth of the Ghana empire, which traded its gold, kola nuts, and slaves. In 1324, Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, made a historically famous Hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. Between 1000 and 1500, the forests of West Africa also became part of trade networks, particularly under the reigns of the Yoruba kings. Ifé was a vital trade town, along the route from the tropical forests to Djenné, a major trade centre in Sudan, near other large trade cities such as Timbuktu and Gao.

By 1000, the Bantu language-speaking people of Zimbabwe and Southern Africa developed extensive overseas trade with lands as far away as China and India, from which they received porcelain, beads, and Persian and Arab pots. Much trade in the forest kingdoms was done at the local level, typically by ordinary Yoruba people at local markets. In some towns these were held every 3 or 4 days. Cloth, vegetables, meat, and other goods were traded, and paid for using small seashells called cowries which were imported from East Africa.

European Colonization and Its Effects

The earliest European colonists settled in North Africa in ancient times. Portugal was the first European empire to penetrate deep into Sub-Saharan Africa to establish colonies. Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator advanced Portuguese exploration of Africa, driven by two desires: to spread Christianity, and to establish Africa as a bastion of Christianity against the Ottoman Empire, which was making many African converts to Islam. Africa was exploited for commercial purposes because of another Portuguese goal: to find a route to India, which would open the entire Indian Ocean region to direct trade with Portugal.

The Portuguese began significant trading with West Africa in the 15th century. Soon, however, other European powers such as France, Denmark, the Netherlands and Britain were developing their own trade with Africa, and they had fewer restrictions. The major European imperial powers in Africa were Portugal, Great Britain, France, and to a lesser extent Germany, Belgium, Spain and Italy. Previously, trade with Sub-Saharan Africa could only be conducted through North African middlemen. This valuable trade lead to rapid change in West Africa.

The massive profits from trade and the arrival of guns lead to significant centralization and a number of states formed in the region such as the Ashanti Confederacy and Kingdom of Benin. These states became some of the wealthiest and most advanced in Africa. Early historical accounts of the Atlantic slave trade were largely written for a popular audience by abolitionists and former slaves like Olaudah Equiano who emphasized its profoundly negative effects on African peoples.

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The Atlantic Slave Trade

Debates on the economic impacts of the Atlantic trade were further stimulated by the publication of Philip Curtin's The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), which argued that 9.566 million slaves were exported from Africa through the Atlantic trade. In the 1970s, the debate on the economic impacts of the Atlantic trade increasingly turned on demographic estimates of slave exports in relation to continental birth rates. Most scholars now believe that Curtin was too conservative in his calculation, with most estimates ranging between 11.5 million to 15.4 million.

Routes of the Atlantic Slave Trade

The Berlin Conference and the Scramble for Africa

The Berlin Conference (German: Kongokonferenz or "Congo Conference") of 1884-85 regulated European colonization and trade in Africa during the Imperialism period, and coincided with Germany's sudden emergence as an imperial power. All of Africa would ultimately fall under European colonial rule by 1914, with the exceptions of Ethiopia and Liberia.

Under colonial rule, the plantation system of farming was widely introduced in order to grow large quantities of cash crops, and employing cheap (often forced) African labor for export to European countries. Mining for gems and precious metals such as gold was developed in a similar way by wealthy European entrepreneurs such as Cecil Rhodes. One extreme example of exploitation of Africans during this period is the Congo Free State, administered under a form of "company rule". The Belgians, under Leopold II of Belgium, allowed businesses to use forced labour as they saw fit.

In white settler colonies like Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa and Southwest Africa (now Namibia), the most fertile lands were forcibly expropriated from the indigenous populations for use by white settlers. In these countries African farmers were pushed onto "native reserves," usually located on arid, marginal lands.

To some colonizers, such as the British, the ideal colony was based on an open economy, actively engaged in world trade through the export of raw materials and the import of finished goods. The British practiced a policy of light administration, enforcing relatively little regulation on their colonies, especially in non-economic matters. As long as British interests were achieved, native populations were given greater individual freedoms.

Colonizers were under heavy political pressure to make their colonies immediately and continuously profitable. In almost all cases, this constraint led to a shortage of long-term investment from the mother countries into the economic development in their colonies. While these countries did finance some major infrastructure projects designed to facilitate...

St. Augustine: A Microcosm of Historical Markets

St. Augustine has always had a public market. When the sixteenth-century Spanish founded the city, meat and vegetable stalls occupied the waterfront site where today Cathedral Place and King Street intersect with Highway A1A. A central public plaza was part of the colonial city plan, in accordance with King Phillip II's Spanish Royal Ordinance of 1573 mandating an official plan for all colonial towns.

A fence formerly divided the "plaza" from the "market" to separate the sale of meat and produce-where horse-carts could unload goods-from the town's assembly site, government house, and gardens. The Spanish previously used the market as a guardhouse. A masonry structure with four bays under heavy piers and a pitched roof, built by city leaders in 1824, provided the first permanent sanitary space for selling food. The waters of Matanzas Bay originally reached almost to the market's steps (the boat basin was filled in 1900), making it an easy shipping destination.

The earliest photographs of the market, made in the 1860s and 1870s, depict the pavilion as a destination for incoming ships' cargo and a pleasant place to gather. In the 1880s and 1890s, when new hotels and a railroad developed by Henry Flagler incited a tourist boom, enterprising photographers sold images of a "slave market" that attracted northerners eager to glimpse something of the antebellum South's oppressive past. The term "slave market" did not enter popular use until the 1870s, and the market is just one among many monuments competing for visitors' attention.

Civil rights protestors including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Andrew Young led nightly marches around the market, enduring physical violence and arrest. The "slave market" became the focal point for the 1964 St. Augustine Movement-a clash between nonviolent protestors and segregationists-prior to President Lyndon Johnson's signing the Civil Rights Act.

Located directly south of the "slave market," the plaza's first civil rights memorial, the 2011 St. Augustine Foot Soldiers Monument, overlooks a former Woolworth's where desegregation sit-ins occurred in the 1960s. Two months later the city dedicated designer Jeremy Marquis's "Andrew Young Crossing," a monument to the well-known activist who led protests at the "slave market" for its symbolism of racial oppression and who was beaten here by segregationists.

St. Augustine Mayor Joseph Boles, Jr. noted in his dedication speech that visitors would "see this monument next to the Old Slave Market where evil held forth in the diatribes and hate speech of the KKK during the marches and they will know that this blessed event is designed to exorcise that nightmare."

Table: Key Events in St. Augustine's Market History

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