Trans-Saharan Trade: Gold, Salt and Camel Caravans Across Africa

The trans-Saharan trade was the network of camel caravans that crossed the Sahara Desert between North Africa and West Africa, at its height from about the 8th to the 16th century. Its most famous exchange was gold from West Africa for rock salt from the desert, but it also carried cloth, copper, books, horses and enslaved people. The trade made West African kingdoms rich, supplied much of the gold of the medieval Mediterranean, and brought Islam and Arabic writing south of the Sahara.

Before the caravans

The Sahara was not always a barrier. Thousands of years ago, during the African Humid Period, much of it was grassland with lakes. As it dried out after about 3000 BC, contacts became harder but never stopped. In ancient times the Garamantes of the Libyan Fezzan controlled routes through the central desert and traded with the Roman world.

The key change was the camel. Dromedaries were introduced to North Africa from the east and became common there during the late Roman period, roughly the 2nd to 4th centuries AD. A camel can carry 100–150 kilograms and go for many days without water, making long desert crossings practical.

The rise of the caravan trade

After the Arab conquest of North Africa in the 7th century, merchants in the new Islamic cities looked south. By the 8th century, Berber traders, many of them followers of the Ibadi and Sufri branches of Islam, were organising regular caravans. Trading towns grew up on the northern edge of the desert, including Tahert in Algeria, Wargla (Ouargla), and Sijilmasa in Morocco, founded around 757.

On the southern side of the desert, the Ghana Empire emerged as the great power controlling access to West African gold. Arab writers of the 8th and 9th centuries already knew Ghana as the land of gold.

What was traded

Gold

West Africa had some of the richest goldfields of the medieval world. The main sources were Bambuk, between the Senegal and Faleme rivers; Bure, on the upper Niger; and later the forests of the Akan region in present-day Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. Gold was mined from shallow pits and panned from rivers by local communities.

The gold travelled north as dust and nuggets. In North Africa it was minted into coins. Gold dinars struck by the Fatimid caliphs from the 10th century, and later by the Almoravids, were among the most trusted coins around the Mediterranean, and much of their metal came from West Africa. Historians agree that West Africa supplied a large share of the gold used in North Africa and Europe in the later Middle Ages, though exact quantities cannot be measured.

Salt

Salt was essential for human health, for preserving food and for livestock, and it was scarce in the Sahel and the forest zone. The Sahara had large deposits of rock salt left by ancient lakes.

The most famous mine was Taghaza, in what is now northern Mali. Ibn Battuta, who passed through in 1352, described a town whose houses and mosque were built of blocks of salt and roofed with camel skins, where the miners depended entirely on food brought in by caravans. Salt was cut into large slabs and carried south on camels. After Taghaza was abandoned in the late 16th century, the mines of Taoudenni further south took its place, and caravans continued to carry Taoudenni salt to Timbuktu into modern times.

Routes and towns

There was never a single road. Routes shifted with politics, security and water supplies. The main ones included:

• The western route: from Sijilmasa south through Taghaza to Awdaghust and Ghana, and later to Walata and Timbuktu.
• The central routes: from Tunisia and Algeria through Wargla and Tuat to Gao and the Niger bend.
• The eastern route: from Tripoli through the Fezzan to Lake Chad and the Kanem empire.

At the southern end, trading towns known as ports of the Sahel received the caravans. Awdaghust, Koumbi Saleh, Walata, Timbuktu, Gao and Djenne each prospered at different times. There, gold, ivory and other goods from the south were exchanged for salt and goods from the north.

How a caravan worked

Crossings were usually made in the cooler months. A journey from Sijilmasa to Walata took about two months. Caravans could include hundreds of camels, and in later centuries the great salt caravans to Taoudenni sometimes numbered thousands.

Guides, often from Saharan peoples such as the Massufa, a Sanhaja Berber group, were essential. Ibn Battuta described how the caravan sent a scout ahead to Walata to arrange for water to be brought out to meet it; if the scout died in the desert, the whole caravan could be in danger. Oases and wells were spaced several days apart, and losing the way could be fatal.

Merchants, money and credit

The caravan trade depended on trust between merchants who might live two months’ journey apart. Many trading families kept partners or relatives at both ends of a route, so that goods and payments could be settled without carrying all the gold across the desert. The geographer Ibn Hawqal, writing in the 10th century, reported seeing at Awdaghust a written promissory note for 42,000 dinars owed by one merchant to another in Sijilmasa, a sum he found astonishing.

Different forms of money circulated in different zones. North African traders used gold and silver coins, while in the Sahel gold dust, copper, cloth strips and salt slabs served as currencies. By the 14th century cowrie shells, brought from the Indian Ocean through Egypt and North Africa, were in use as small change in the markets of Mali, as Ibn Battuta noted.

Merchant communities also carried law and custom. Muslim traders followed shared rules on contracts, partnerships and debts, and the presence of judges and scholars in the trading towns helped settle disputes. This shared framework made long-distance trade across very different societies possible.

The trade in people

Enslaved people were carried north across the Sahara throughout the period, many of them captured in wars and raids in the Sahel and the lands to its south. They were sold in North Africa, Egypt and the Middle East as household servants, soldiers and labourers. The numbers are very uncertain; historians’ estimates for the whole period from the 7th to the 19th centuries run into several million people. Many died on the desert crossing.

Islam, writing and learning

Muslim merchants brought their faith, and over the centuries West African rulers adopted it. The king of Takrur, on the Senegal River, had converted by about 1040. The rulers of Gao and Kanem became Muslims in the 11th century, and the kings of Mali were Muslims by the 13th century.

Islam brought Arabic literacy. Scholars, judges and teachers settled in Sahelian towns, where libraries and schools grew. Timbuktu became a famous centre of Islamic learning, and thousands of manuscripts from the region survive today.

The most spectacular sign of the wealth this trade created was the hajj of Mansa Musa of Mali in 1324. The Egyptian writer al-Umari reported that the gold he spent in Cairo depressed the value of gold there for years.

Myths and facts

• Myth: salt was traded for its weight in gold. Fact: salt was valuable, but prices varied by place and time, and there was no rule of equal weights.
• Myth: the “silent trade” was the normal way of trading. Fact: writers from Herodotus to medieval Arab geographers described buyers and sellers who never met, leaving goods on the ground. This may reflect real practices at the goldfields, but most trade took place face to face in markets.
• Myth: the Sahara cut Africa in two. Fact: for well over a thousand years it was crossed regularly by people, goods and ideas.

Decline

The trade did not end suddenly. From the 1440s Portuguese ships reached the West African coast and began buying gold directly. The fort of Elmina, built in 1482 on the Gold Coast, drew Akan gold towards the Atlantic.

In 1591 a Moroccan army crossed the Sahara and defeated the Songhay Empire at the Battle of Tondibi. The conquest disrupted the Niger markets and the old political order. Caravans still crossed the desert, and the salt trade survived into the 20th century, but the Sahara’s central role in the gold trade was over.

Timeline

• 2nd–4th centuries AD: Camels become common in North Africa.
• c. 757: Sijilmasa is founded on the northern edge of the Sahara.
• Late 8th century: Arab writers describe Ghana as the land of gold.
• 10th century: Fatimid gold dinars, minted largely from West African gold, circulate widely.
• 1068: Al-Bakri describes the trade of Ghana and its taxes on salt.
• 1324: Mansa Musa of Mali makes his famous pilgrimage through Cairo.
• 1352: Ibn Battuta crosses the Sahara via Taghaza to Mali.
• 1482: The Portuguese build Elmina on the Gold Coast.
• 1591: Morocco defeats Songhay at Tondibi.

Why it matters

The trans-Saharan trade tied West Africa into the economy of the Mediterranean and the Islamic world for nearly a thousand years. It helped create the great Sahelian empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhay, spread Islam and literacy, and supplied the gold that circulated in medieval coins. It also carried a long and painful trade in enslaved people, which is an essential part of its history.