Small Shoots of Green (Resurgence)
430 – 480 CE
“An elephant does not die from one broken rib.”
Slowly, slowly, Ansongo regained its strength. Partially subjugated it might have been and while Ansongo had seceded territory to the Karoo and Bafer peoples, its core territories with fertile soil watered by the Niger River were still firmly loyal to Bamako and this was to be the demographic heart of its future victories. However, there were several strategies Ansongo employed to stop its losses. The first was shifting focus to an increased emphasis on martial prowess and tactics within the male age sets and as part of the age sets rituals, the participants would serve in the local forces for a minimum of five years, patrolling the territory, participating in public works projects, and having mock battles with wooden weapons. Payment was not accepted as a substitute for service, and this helped to establish a healthy respect and experience with the military in all economic strata of society. Another step was to encourage sons of generals and noblemen to become stewards of the Bafer and Karoo, to familiarize themselves with the tactics of the former nomads, as despite their (to the Ansongoans) utter lack of civilization, their skills in handling horses were far superior to those of Ansongoan forces in their care of giant elands. Despite the best efforts of Ansongoan spies, the secrets of making the Nubian bow were not discovered. The mansa Yoro made his move in 432 CE to regain the eastern territories first as they held the better agricultural and browsing land and contained significance as the ancestral boundaries of Ansongo. At the Battle of the Branch (so named because it happened when a tributary of the Niger branched south of the main river), an Ansongoan force of 3,000 men defeated a Karoo force of 1,200 with Ansongoan casualties of 500 and Karoo losses of 800. Several more battles, including the White Acacia, rapidly occurred from that point, and while Ansongoan forces faced relatively heavy losses, they won a good deal of the battles and unlike their semi-nomadic opponents, the much greater population of the riverine Mandinka meant they could much more easily sustain military defeats and field fresh soldiers while the advantages of the Karoo laid in the experience of their men. The Ansongoans and the Karoo danced in the savanna and Sahel for several years before the Battle of the Sands where an Ansongoan force caught a Karoo army and a nearby civilian encampment unawares. In comparison to other battles, the Karoo army was killed to the last man and then to break the will of the Karoos opposing them, an ambitious 23-year-old Ansongoan general named Sainey ordered his soldiers to massacre the encampment “down to the last soul”. As Sainey later told his friends rather matter-of-factly, the Karoos were not a civilized people and so using civilized methods to treat with them “would be like offering a hyena your outstretched hand”. Sainey’s methods were adopted by other commanders and while perhaps brutal, had the effect of cowing the Karoos to come to the treaty table. Ngalo, the prime chieftain of the Karoos, eventually sued for peace in 438 CE and thus agreed all of the Karoo would become vassals of the Ansongoan empire. They were permitted to keep some of their land they had won through conquest but were forced to give up the most productive to Mandinkas that had been dispossessed of their property when the Karoo had originally invaded. In exchange, the Karoo were bound by Ansongoan laws and forbidden from holding any governing positions besides those indigenous to their people and for the first decade of their incorporation, were forced to pay heavy taxes to repay the damage caused by their partial conquest of Bani. This became known as the “horse tax” among the Karoo due to the practice of being forced to sell their horses to pay the tax when they had nothing else to sell. Sainey was promoted to high general for his role in crippling the Karoo menace and received much honor throughout the empire. And now that the Karoo were officially subjects of Ansongo, what to do with them? They knew little of crop raising and their blacksmithing skills were poor compared to that of native smiths. Eventually, they became integrated into the herding and tanning complex that surrounded giant elands, gradually abandoning their equine mounts for the antelopes, using their famed livestock and archery skills to benefit Ansongo and help to defend its eastern border.
The Bafer remained a larger problem, not so easily dealt with like the Karoo people. Unlike the Karoo that had been a recent transplant from the Blue Nile regions, the Bafer were descended from a mingling of Niger and Saharan bloodlines and so could invoke blood ties among the Tuaregs to aid them in their skirmishes with Ansongo. Sainey now headed forces against the Bafer people in 440 CE, loosely lead by Izem the Green’s son, also named Izem II, who was disparagingly called “the lion cub” by his enemies. Ansongo’s army relied heavily on giant eland cavalry but again were out-performed by the Bafer, who used a mixture of equines and elands as their mounts and who lived and died in the saddle. Izem II was killed in a pitched battle by a stray arrow in 444 CE and Sainey lost his right eye and was heavily wounded in what was supposed to be a minor skirmish not long after and contemporary historians and jalis said that those events seemed to drain the Bafer people and the Ansongoan Empire of their taste for war as they met to discuss terms of peace only a few days later at the beginning of April. Later jalis would note that the sudden death of Izem II lead to succession struggles among his clan that complicated the Bafer’s war effort and Ansongo was still recovering from the Crocodile’s War and its loss of trade routes and could not sustain nearly a decade of war. The Bafer, now lead by Izem II’s daughter Illi, agreed to secede about half of Ansongo’s northernmost province to the full command of the empire and unlike the Karoo, kept their autonomy.
From 444 CE on, mansa Yoro focused on rebuilding its trade relationship with Carthage, but alas, the Phoenician civilization breathed no longer. The Punics were scattered across the Mediterranean, settled at the mouth of the Senegal River, or under the rule of their new Germanic overlords. While the trans-Saharan trade continued, it was through the now largely stateless Barbary peoples as the newly crafted kingdoms of the Suebi and Vandals of Byzacena had little interest in the goods of Africa. In these days, intermarriage between the Germanic invaders and Berber natives became increasingly common and a new people began to form, a small minority though they may have been. With the trans-Saharan trade diminished, Ansongo looked south for new wealth. The Desert Foxes, a secret society of merchants that had helped finance the downfall of the Baturus and rise of the Mariko dynasty, were the pioneers of a much more established presence in the southern forests. They did this by having less favored sons and daughters marrying into trader and merchant families depending on whether the marriage patterns were matrilineal or patrilineal; but such alliances could be fraught with difficulty. One granddaughter of a prominent merchant named Modou1 even wrote to her parents about the lack of sophistication of her groom’s people, the Asante, complaining that, “…what they call a city we call a village and what they claim is a village we would name a farm, there are no wrestling pits, the food is bland, the women are coarse and the men savage…”. Here, salt, copper, eland meat, and beef from Ansongo could be traded for hardwoods, dyes, spices, and kola nuts. The trade at times lacked the grandeur of the trans-Saharan trade, but many of the goods were essential to daily life and so were in demand in times both prosperous and lean. This more domestic trade also encouraged the advancement of agricultural methods and due to the proximity of the two trading spheres, such knowledge more easily flowed between the savanna and forests.
Ansongo also looked east to Mao and Aksum and west to Kita and the ocean for more commercial opportunities. Aksum was twice the distance from Ansongo than Carthage was and so the trade wasn’t as profitable or practical, but this did provide another diminished avenue for the gold and salt trade, as Aksum had large salt deposits it mined for commercial trade. The typical route was an eastern trek through the kingdom of Mao at which point most goods would be sold and exchanged for goods from Egyptian or Aksumite merchants, and Ansongoan traders would load their eland-drawn carts and start on the road back home. Few merchants ever wanted to make the journey around the highlands of the Blue Nile to trade in Axum itself and besides, even fewer with the desire had the wealth to finance such a long-range caravan. They would much rather integrate their fortunes into the growing verdant heart of the Niger delta that emptied into the sea. The Nok kingdoms that had been reinvigorated from Mande and Songhai migrants, had briefly been united into five different entities before shattering into a dozen different chiefdoms, under control of the local ethnicities, the Nok having been long absorbed into the stunning collage of ethnic groups, the Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa being most prominent among them. The Niger delta even before the advent of giant eland taming had been a lush and densely peopled region of Africa, now with the usage of elands and plows in 400 CE, its population density was even higher than Ansongo’s more developed inner delta. Like Ansongo, a high degree of cultural and commercial sophistication existed here, but unlike Ansongo, the Niger delta remained stubbornly non-hierarchal. There was already a large trade network that extended east and southward overland into the Nzere Nzadi (or simply “Nzere”) basin or westward into the coastal forests and it was here that Ansongoan traders wanted further access into. However, Ansongo knew it could not conquer the delta area, which left the tool of diplomacy to establish relations with the delta.
The greater sophistication of the delta, specifically of the Igbo people that lived in the area enabled them to resist outright economic domination by the Ansongoans that explored the area and led to a more equal relationship than that of the dynamic between the Mandes and the people of the coastal forests to the west. The brass sculptures of the Igbo were the most coveted good among the Ansongoans, which they also sold to Kita and Mao. These sculptures would end up in the houses of Egyptian nobility, and the dhows of Aksumite and Kori merchants to travel the Indian Ocean to Arabia and the Indian subcontinent. But more valuable than the goods were the writings of Ansongo, of which certain Igbo merchants were fascinated by. Merchants were the first to adopt Southern Punic, as it allowed them to much more easily count their wares and track transactions. From there, chiefs used the script to track the movement of people and the agricultural production of staples like yams and oil palms. Of course, the common man had no desire or need to learn how to read or write as delta society and politics were perfectly navigable without the aid of literacy and the “Mande Letters” as the Southern Punic script became known in the Niger delta remained the province of the elite, and even then only for referential and decorative matters. Some “big men” of their communities might have an artisan that had some knowledge of the Letters to paint or inscribe them on their house doors and walls to display their prestige. In this way, Ansongo became associated with a general sense of prestige. “The Ansongoans”, one Igbo merchant wrote in 478 CE, “are very clever, able to make the desert bloom at the mansa’s command and are more numerous than locusts. They have powerful magics and their blacksmiths are more potent than any we can produce. But they are a proud and haughty people, a common merchant will speak to a chief as if the man were in an age-set below him and will brook no reprimand.” While this attitude would be indulged to retain access Ansongoan salt and specialty goods, ethnic tensions could occasionally flare into minor riots and protests at the small but economically powerful Mandinka colonists that would settle in the area to escape political tensions of their homeland. The descendants of the Songhai and Mandinka people that had intermarried with the Nok back in the 3rd century were often noted to be shown favoritism by visiting Ansongoan traders and native merchants would often complain of the unfairness of the situation. But as Ansongo was drawn deeper into the land of the delta, dire challenges to both the east and west of its Sahelian borders would soon demand the full attention of the recovering empire.
