The 17th Century: Meanwhile in Africa Quiz

Answer: Somalia

It is said that the Somali language has 46 words for the camel, and this useful animal continues to be highly valued by the people of Somalia. Their domestication of the one-humped dromedary species, highly adapted to arid conditions, was essential to the salt trade between North Africa and other regions of the continent across the Sahara desert, beginning in the 5th century A.D. and reaching its highest point from the 8th to the 17th centuries.

The Mediterranean area and eventually northern Europe were thus exposed to products from Africa, like gold, ivory, people sold as slaves, and camels, of course, which in the long run weren't suited to Europe, even sunny Italy.

It is difficult to date the cave paintings of Eritrea, because the paint does not contain carbon, but in their own way they document the presence of camels in the Horn of Africa from the distant past.

Answer: Ethiopia

While the first documented evidence of coffee drinking is from Yemen, across the Red Sea from the Horn of Africa, coffee itself is native to the mountains of Ethiopia, and the plants can still be found growing wild in the "cloud forests" of the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, near Bonga.

A legend written down in 1671 tells of an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi, who noticed how lively his goats became after eating the berries of the coffee plant, then tried them himself and took them to a Sufi monastery, where the monks threw the berries into the fire.

The aroma of the roasting coffee beans was so appealing, the monks ground up the beans, boiled up some water, and the rest is history - or myth. In other stories of Kaldi, the monks are Abyssinian Christians.

Another version has the Archangel Gabriel bringing a hot cup of black coffee to the Prophet Mohammed. Ethiopian coffee is the original Arabica variety valued around the world. In Ethiopia and nearby Eritrea (on the Red Sea coast that was once part of Ethiopia) a coffee ceremony includes arranging utensils on sweet-smelling grasses; roasting the beans over a fire; grinding, stirring, pouring coffee into a pot; brewing, straining, then pouring gracefully into individual cups.

The third cup is supposed to bring a blessing. Can't you smell it now?

Answer: Ebony

Both ebony and ivory were products of Africa valued by Europeans in the 1600s and after - ivory coming from elephant tusks and ebony from trees. While ebony species are also native to parts of Asia, there are two types of ebony found in Africa, one in the West African nation of Gabon, and the other on the island of Mauritius off the southeast coast, where the Dutch East India Company traded in the 17th Century. Chess pieces echo the natural materials of the piano keyboard, with ivory for the white chessmen and ebony for the black ones.

Some of the ebony-like wood 17th Century Europeans found in Africa was mpingo (its Swahili name), also called African blackwood or grenadilla (Dalbergia melanoxylonis) - a fine hardwood once also called ebony, considered "the world's most expensive tree" because it is highly valued but becoming rare. Mpingo has a particularly fine resonance when used to make clarinets and other woodwinds, bagpipes, and string instruments. African blackwood grows in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and elsewhere along the Swahili coast of East Africa.

Answer: Portugal

"Fortaleza de Jesus de Mombaça" (Fort Jesus of Mombasa) was built by the Portuguese just before 1600 to defend their trading routes in the Indian Ocean and outposts on the Swahili Coast of Africa. The Portuguese installed the King of Malindi as sultan and puppet governor, but a later Islamic Sultan of Mombasa, Muhammed Yusif bin Hassan, took the fort in 1631, holding it for less than a year.

The Sultan of Oman put Mombasa under siege and seized Fort Jesus in 1698, holding it for the next thirty years, with the conflict between Christian and Muslim continuing, as the fort was claimed by first one then the other. Disease also took its toll on occupants of the fort. Seen on a map, like the 17th century chart in our picture, or from an aerial or satellite view today, Fort Jesus stands out on the small harbor island of Mombasa, looking like a boxy human figure.

It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, significant as an example of Portuguese military architecture. On the Atlantic Ocean, Europe's most western nation, Portugal was the first to sponsor voyages around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean and the first to explore the east coast of Africa. Vasco da Gama made landfall at Mombasa in 1498.

They explored the Zambezi River in the 16th century, seeking entry into the gold trade and other riches of central Africa. They also were the first European nation to deal in slaves. But by the 17th century, Portugal had reached its peak as a mercantile power, was struggling against Spain, and was declining as a sea power.

Answer: True

In 1685, when King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had granted Huguenots limited rights, many French Protestants fled to the Netherlands for religious freedom. This happened at the time the Cape Colony, administered by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), was expanding from its original intent in 1652 to be simply a way station on the route to the Indian Ocean to become a large agricultural operation, with free Dutch burghers setting up farms.

The people who already lived on the Cape closest to European settlement were Khoikhoi (called Hottentots by the Dutch, but literally "People People").

The Khoikhoi were herders with traditional migration paths and with prestige in the tribe connected to ownership of livestock. Also in the region were the San people (called Bushmen by the Europeans), an ancient culture who lived as hunter / gatherers. Bantu speaking people, who were agriculturalists, were in southern Africa but not in the immediate area of the Cape Colony in the 17th century. None of these indigenous people were interested in becoming farmers working simply to supply the needs of the Dutch East India Company, and at this point they were able to resist or avoid becoming enslaved by the settlers.

Therefore, the Huguenots joined the Dutch farmers in this commercial enterprise. However, it became clear to the administrators of the colony that cheap labor was needed to get the work done in a profitable manner. In 1658, black people originally from Angola were brought in, captured from a Portuguese slave ship in the Atlantic. Others were transported from West Africa and Madagascar in the 1600s, in addition to personal slaves acquired by VOC employees on the shores of the Indian Ocean in Asia, Africa, and the islands. By 1693, slaves outnumbered free people on the Cape of Good Hope.

Answer: Termite mounds

Historians long assumed that iron technology came to sub-Saharan Africa from the Middle East by way of North Africa; however, archaeological and cultural evidence points toward African peoples' independent discovery of metallurgy, beginning around 5,000 years ago. The earliest artifact of worked iron is from Egypt and is of meteoric origin, but ancient smelting of iron ore has been found in Niger, Nigeria, the Central African Republic, and elsewhere on the continent. UNESCO's ground-breaking studies trace the "iron roads of Africa" disrupted by the incursions of the slave trade before and after the 17th Century; they also are preserving early sites of iron making and considering their importance in the creation of kingdoms like the Benin, Yoruba, and Dahomey.

The over 1,000 species of termites endemic to Africa have great cultural importance, serving as food for humans and livestock, bait for fish and birds, and sources of edible mushrooms and other fungi used for medicine. The clay soil of termite mounds can be used as fertilizer, building material, pottery making, and a dietary mineral supplement. Iron oxides and other elements in termite clay and its water dispersion qualities enhanced efficiency of bloomery furnaces that must reach 1100-1300 degrees Celsius to turn iron oxides into metallic iron. Iron smelters in the Congo used the slanted side of a termite mound to construct such furnaces, and smelters in Zambia bound together pieces of termite mounds with clay and also made tuyeres (devices to direct air into the furnace through a bellows) from bamboo smeared with termite clay or (in one case) the tip of a termite mound itself!

Answer: Guinea

Guinea coins were first issued in 1663 under Charles II and continued to be struck under successive rulers of England until 1814, showing the monarchs' images in profile but sometimes adding a small depiction of an elephant or both an elephant and a howdah (used for riding on an elephant). Because the howdah looks a bit like a castle, the image (also the emblem of the Royal African Company) was called "the elephant and castle". Like the East India Company chartered to trade with Asia, the Royal African Company held the British monopoly on trade with Africa.

By the 17th century, gold had been part of West Africa's economy for at least 1500 years, panned in streams and taken from shafts dug near the headwaters of the Niger and Senegal rivers and other inland areas and sold for salt and other goods as part of the Muslim trans-Saharan system of trade routes. Energized by this trade, great empires like Ghana and Mali grew up in the Sahel, between the desert of North Africa and the savannas and tropical forests of the south, before Europeans "discovered" the continent of Africa. Timbuktu became a center of learning and study of sharia law, not just for Africa but all Islam.

In the 14th century, Mansa Musa had traveled from Mali to Mecca on a hajj and spread around so much gold in the cities along the way it led to inflation! But in 1591, the sultan of Morocco sent a military force against the Songhai, the last of these empires, and economic power shifted south. In the 17th Century, the Kongo empire in Angola and central Africa and successive empires like the Oyo, Dahomey,and Benin along what English merchants called the Guinea Coast became the focus of trade. African rulers exerted influence on European governments as power was sorted out, with the Kongo king setting the Dutch on the Portuguese in the 1640s in hopes of gaining control. As gold was discovered in the Americas and colonial plantations became dependent upon slaves, the trade in human beings began to overshadow trade in ivory, palm oil, cloth, and gold, but these products remained important, as the historical and archaeological records show. A precise and culturally meaningful system of weights and measures existed, and special boxes were crafted to hold gold dust. Many of these objects can be seen in exhibits of African art and history. Ironically, African societies more often used cowrie shells, not gold, as a medium of exchange, but they continued to value gold as a product for export and a traditional symbol of status and wealth.

Answer: Salt

Diamonds were a crystal much valued in 17th century Europe, with monarchs like Louis XIII of France, who reigned between 1610 and 1643, outlawing their ownership to anyone but the king himself. Diamonds came from India, then were discovered in Brazil, but it was not until the late 1800s that Africa became a source of diamonds, beginning a bloody history that continues in the 21st century. Through most of history, in some parts of Africa, another crystal was more important than diamonds and was worth its weight in gold: halite, otherwise known as salt.

The salt of the Saharan oases of Tagaza and Taodeni, north of Timbuktu in Mali and Mauritania, along with the camel for transport, made possible a dynamic trade between North Africa and the gold-rich kingdoms of the West African forests, lasting for centuries. Bars or slabs of salt (as shown in our picture) were so plentiful in the desert, they could be used to build houses for the miners.

They were taken south and traded for gold, slaves, ivory, textiles, and agricultural products. Products also reached West Africa along with the salt, like horses, weapons, and goods that had arrived in North Africa through trade with other continents. Islam also came to Africa by way of the trans-Saharan salt and gold trade.

By the 17th century, this trade - along with the cities in the Sahel that flourished as a result of it - had been destroyed by invasions of Moroccan sultans from the north and incursions of Europeans on the Atlantic coast, but its cultural influence was lasting.

Answer: Queen Mothers

The Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History created by the Metropolitan Museum of Art places the ivory pendant mask in our picture and other depictions of the Queen Mothers in the historical context of West Africa in the 17th century and the centuries preceding and following it.

The Royal Court of Benin, where the custom of granting Queen Mothers political power was most evident, existed from the 13th century until 1897, when a military expedition sent by the British Empire deliberately destroyed the capital city of the Benin people and looted the art, including several images of the Queen Mother.

However, the office of the Queen Mother is not specific to the Benin kingdom, which dates its beginnings to a specific person and situation at the end of the 15th Century, when a son of the royal house, Esigie, credited his mother Idia with using magical powers and political counsel to help him gain the throne (or golden stool).

The very real power of the Iyoba, equal to a senior chief, continued to be wielded by mothers of the king to the end of the Benin empire. Queen mothers were already important figures in other West African societies, especially among Akan speakers like the Ashanti nation, where they acted as judges in disputes and were considered the spiritual rulers of the people, equal in status to their sons, the kings.

Answer: Barbary Corsairs

Corsairs differ from pirates in that corsairs are protected and financed by a state in exchange for a share in stolen goods and captives, as well as the political advantages of terror and war (or jihad, as Muslim corsairs saw it). The Barbary Coast of North Africa provided harbors, arms, and markets for the Barbary corsairs, under the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and under city states like Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers in the west and on the Atlantic coast. Morocco, of all the these states, remained most African, keeping relatively free of Ottoman control. Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif, also known as Mulai the Bloodthirsty, the second ruler of the Moroccan Alaouite dynasty from 1672 to 1727, is remembered best for siring a seemingly impossible 1042 children, but his cruelty was his true claim to fame.

His formidable army was made up of black slaves from sub-Saharan Africa, who - unlike his Berber and Bedouin neighbors - were raised to be soldiers and owed loyalty to the sultan alone. Few of the Europeans captured by the Barbary corsairs were ransomed, although Charles II and others made attempts to get English slaves freed. Most captives were sold to other parts of the Arab and Turkish world, but many were imprisoned by the sultan himself and subjected to extreme cruelty. Seeing himself as a grand monarch rivaling France's Louis XIV, with whom he exchanged ambassadors, he used white slaves to build palaces and other buildings, including a granary and stable to hold 12,000 horses, and a fifteen-mile wall around his first capital city, Meknes. Throughout the 17th and 18th Centuries, Europeans were constantly negotiating, bribing, and fighting to protect shipping and redeem fellow citizens enslaved along the Barbary Coast.

They failed to draw parallels between their distress over the plight of white slaves captured at sea and in coastal raids, numbering close to a million, and the despair of black people being taken from sub-Saharan Africa in what would be even greater numbers to work on colonial plantations.