>> the east African coast, the House of Peace, have a name from a
>> language whose heartland is two thousand miles north?
>
>Because, he would say, that region is not Africa, that is, Black
>Africa.
Why isn't Dar-es-Salaam considered part of Black Africa? For that matter,
what constitutes Black Africa? I think it might make sense to distinguish
Subsaharan Africa from North Africa, but from a socioeconomic perspective
Dar-es-Salaam and Timbuktu certainly can be grouped together. More relevant
to the question under consideration is what happened to places like
Timbuktu or Dar-es-Salaam historically. While they were not as central to
world trade as Kalkut or Malacca, neither could they be accurately
described as "backward".
After visiting Timbuktu in 1352, Abu Ibn Battuta wrote in his "Book of
Travels", "There is complete security in their country. Neither traveler
nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers or men of violence."
Two centuries later, a Spanish Moor, Wazzan Zayyati -- known by the pen
name Leo Africanus -- praised the city as a haven for "a great store of
doctors, judges, priests and other learned men that are bountifully
maintained at the king's expense." Timbuktu's scholars taught thousands of
students and maintained large private libraries.
That era ended in 1591, when a Moroccan army destroyed Songhai, the empire
that housed Timbuktu. Portuguese navigators accelerated its descent into
poverty by destroying the city's commercial viability, in much the same
manner as Great Britain did in India after the Battle of Plessy. Timbuktu's
fall was about conquest by human beings, not germs.
Louis Proyect
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