A huge role in the history of Africa was played by long-distance caravan trade, which developed by the end of the first millennium A.D. The most important trade routes for West Africa were from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea through the Sahara Desert. Caravans carried gold, ivory and gum from the south, handicrafts from the Mediterranean and rock salt from the Sahara from the north. The same process took place on the eastern coast of Africa, only there the trade routes ran not along the sands, but along the Indian Ocean, and the intermediaries between Arabs, Persians, Indians and Africans were not powerful empires, but independent Swahili trading cities.
The enterprising Africans who had converted to Islam formed their own merchant class, and these people quickly extended a trading network into the interior of the continent. In West Africa the most important commodity for a long time was the kola nut, which grows on a low tree in the forest zone. This bitter nut, because of its tonic effect, has always been highly prized in the cities of western Sudan; even the word “south” literally means “kola nut country” in some languages.
Some peoples have been able to trade worse, others better. In East Africa, the Swahili and their Indian rivals controlled all trade; in West Sudan, the Hausa, Soninke, and Maninka were the main trading peoples, and on the coast the Lebanese and Syrians. The southeastern Maninka are so called, Dyula, which means “merchants”; this is the name that has stuck with them.
The simple-minded farmers do not like the dodgy merchants, they envy their wealth, and sometimes, when life is especially difficult, they get up and go and smash stores and stalls. But if the merchants, having abandoned their wealth by hook or by crook, leave their land, then the economy declines, and everyone begins to dream of the return of the once hated merchants.