Erosion of Local Traditions and Globalization

[Gary Oswald]

The Swahili coast served as East Africa's gateway to the rest of the world.

All coasts do. The West African coast never developed a similar lingua franca despite being far busier in trade.

 

[Ricardolindo]

All coasts do. The West African coast never developed a similar lingua franca despite being far busier in trade.

Actually, the West African coast wasn't all that important. The Sahelian and Sudanian empires were inland.

 

[Gary Oswald]

Actually, the West African coast wasn't all that important. The Sahelian and Sudanian Empires were inland.

I see what you're saying in this. In that prior to the late 1400s, West African trade mostly went north to the arab states in the Magreb and it's only really 1500 to 1900 that the Atlantic trade surpassed that. Whereas in East Africa the main trade was always the indian ocean one.

But for 400 years, the Atlantic trade was massive and was easily the largest single trade in Africa. From 1500 onwards the sahel states died on the stem and the inland empires were desperate to get into the coastal trade instead. Ashanti and Dahomey and a lot of what we think of as coastal empires, started as internal ones and fought their way to the coast.

I think to an extent a native language could have become a lingua franca in West Africa, Yoruba would be the obvious choice, had the politics been there for that. My instinct is that it was the centralising influence of the Omani Empire more than anything that changed things in East Africa..