By Maylam, Paul; Edwards, Iain
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This rich southern Saharan entrepot was only ten days’ journey from Kumbi Salih, the pre-desert capital of Ancient Ghana, and the international market of the West African gold trade where Muslim merchants enjoyed the ideological prestige and protection of their religion. It seems that Awdaghost, at the southern end of the Moroccan road, was an early centre of slavery if not the slave trade itself. Sijilmasa, with Zawila, was regarded as one of the two ‘gates’ between the medieval Maghreb and the Sudan.
69 In this typical Sudanese state, with its black pagan peasantry, a formerly foreign and nomadic aristocracy, and a Muslim veneer, domination of peoples was always more important than territorial extent in a region of few natural barriers. Thus, if gold exports were the mainstay of medieval Sudanese societies further to the west, booty, and particularly human booty, was the primary source of Kanemi state income. Slavery and the slave trade, both sanctioned by recently adopted Islam, were essential to the political and economic wellbeing of the Kanemi state.
Then there were the horses themselves: the heavy mounts, probably derived from the Barb breed of North Africa, and better suited to cavalry warfare on the flat, open country of Sudan than the puny local breeds. 100 The ruler of Kanem is said to have had between 30,000 and 40,000 horses by the thirteenth century, which, if not all Barbary imports, were clearly descended from them, and had become a means of state formation and expansion. 101 This imported Iron Age technology of heavy cavalry ‘made possible the raiding and enslavement of those not so provided’.