Discover Top Posts Tagged with #ivory

trying ibis paint on my tablet, i love the amount of options. Also automatic speedpaint >>>

Ivory & the Colonization of Africa

European colonising powers sought to exploit Africa's resources from the 15th century onwards. Arab traders had been doing the same in North Africa and East Africa through the Middle Ages, but it was from the 17th century that European traders began to penetrate deep into the interior in search of high-value goods. Traders, often alerted by the work of explorers and missionaries, were interested in anything that could be sold, such as gold, palm oil, rubber, and slaves. One of the most valuable commodities was ivory, in great demand in India for jewellery and in Europe in the 18th century for everything from decorative boxes to piano keys to billiard balls. The consequences of this lucrative trade included cultural upheaval, the construction of transport systems, wars, colonisation, and the death of tens of thousands of elephants each year.

Sources of Ivory

Ivory was traded between Africa and Europe in ancient times; the Romans, for example, imported ivory from North Africa and Central Africa via the camel caravans of the ancient Sahara. In the Middle Ages, Arab traders founded trade centres to specifically profit from ivory, such as on the island of Zanzibar and along the Swahili Coast of East Africa, although they did not establish any sort of political control beyond the coast. Portuguese traders sought out ivory through the 15th and 16th centuries, establishing trade centres on the west coast of Africa ranging from Upper Guinea to Portuguese Angola. Portuguese traders also acquired ivory on the Swahili Coast in Portuguese Mozambique. The Portuguese often had Africans carve ivory into finished products suitable for the European market, such as salt cellars, walking canes, and cutlery handles. For artworks in ivory, the sculptors of Benin were considered the finest.

By the 17th century, slaves and gold dominated African exports, but ivory was still the third most coveted trade item. In the modern period, European imperial powers like France and Britain sought out new sources of ivory and set up trading stations not only on the coast of the continent but, for the first time, deep in Africa's interior. Traders were first alerted to the potential of Africa's interior by explorers and missionaries. David Livingstone (1813-1873), for example, noted in his travels in the 1850s that

…If it is profitable for those who are engaged in in the coast trade to pass along in their ships and and pick up ivory, bees wax &c., those who may have enterprise enough to push into the interior and receive the goods at first hand would surely find it more profitable…

(Chamberlain, 99)

That riches were to be had in Africa's interior for a fraction of the cost of coastal prices was confirmed by other explorers. Lieutenant Verney Lovett Cameron (1844-1894), writing in the 1870s, describes the ivory in the region of Katanga in what is today DR Congo:

To the eastward of Lovalé ivory is marvellously plentiful. The price among the Arab traders at Nyangwé was 7 1/2 pounds of beads, or 5 pounds of cowries, for 35 pounds of ivory; and the caravans that went out from there for ivory would obtain tusks, irrespective of weight, for an old knife, a copper bracelet, or any other useless thing which might take the fancy of the natives.

(Chamberlain, 99-100)

Such tales of riches in ivory inspired rulers like Leopold II, King of the Belgians (reign 1865-1909), to establish a permanent control over certain regions. Leopold formed the Congo Free State (later to become the Belgian Congo) in 1885, although, in the end, it was rubber that made the king a fortune. Similarly, the presence of ivory convinced imperial Germany to create the colonies of German South West Africa in 1884 and German East Africa the year after. The lure of ivory was also a factor in enticing the British to expand deeper into Southern Africa through the 1880s-90s.

Regions where the ivory trade was particularly developed included East Africa, the Congo Basin, Southern Africa, and the coastal region in West Africa named after the precious commodity: Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivoire). African hunters traded the ivory to other tribes, who then traded it with Arabs or Europeans. The chain of trade could be quite convoluted. In the Congo basin, for example, the Bonjo people hunted the elephants and then traded the ivory with the Loi people. The Loi, in turn, traded the ivory with the Bobangi people, who then traded it with Arabs and Europeans, who transported it out of Africa. Ivory traders might also be involved in more localised trade, using the network's canoes and land routes to additionally trade goods like cassava and palm oil between African tribes.

The wealth generated by the ivory trade (and that in other goods) increased competition between African tribes and encouraged the formation of powerful kingdoms to better monopolise it, examples being the Maravi near Lake Malawi and the Kingdom of Mutapa on the Zambezi River. As the historian A. E. Atmore notes:

The pursuit of ivory was generally destructive and often violent. It involved the organisation of hunting bands, which even when developed locally, were disruptive of older social groupings. Too frequently, it involved raiding across the countryside by alien gangs.

(Fage, 24)

Competition between European, Arab, and African traders often led to open warfare and territorial conquest, with the Africans and Arabs usually coming off worse against the superior weaponry of the Europeans. Even those Africans who directly benefited from the ivory trade did so only in the short term since, with hunting conducted on the scale that it was and using modern weapons supplied by Europeans, ivory in effect became a non-renewable resource as animals were systematically wiped out in one region after another.

⇒ Ivory & the Colonization of Africa

#History #Africa #Colonization #Imperialism #Ivory #Trade #WHE