In 1851, German traveller Heinrich Barth finally touched the borders of the renowned Kano empire, known for its popular textile making art across western Africa. There, he found a city of about sixty thousand people, thriving in a kingdom that clothed much of West Africa.
By Heinrich's estimate, Kano's textiles were worth about 300 million cowrie shells a year, and a substantial part of them sold far beyond the empire itself, worn across the Sahara in Murzuk and Ghat and as far as Tripoli, as well as on the Atlantic coast at Arguin, in today's Mauritania.
Heinrich's eyes would feast on a sight lost to today's society: over two thousand dye pits, sunk into the ground, filled with indigo. By the end of that century, these two thousand pits would have drastically increased to about fifteen to twenty thousand or more. Back then, the empire did not have steam engines or mechanised mills but it was a manufacturing centre in every sense of the word. Its textile industry featured specialised occupations, including cotton production, spinning, weaving, dyeing, and tailoring.
This was one of many large scale mass productions that went on in Africa. The continent had other specialised manufacturing towns whose goods travelled round the continent, as well as at least three serious attempts at a factory revolution.
Iron Production in Pre-Colonial Africa
One of Africa's oldest and most consequential industries was iron production. Long before European colonial rule, African ironworkers mined ore, constructed specialised furnaces, smelted iron and forged metal into tools, agricultural implements, weapons and other objects essential to daily life. Across the continent, several evidential artefacts have cropped up over the centuries, revealing a long history of metallurgical knowledge, and specialised production. In some regions, ironworking expanded beyond local needs to supply wider commercial trade networks.
Take Meroë, the capital of the kingdom of Kush in today's Sudan, as an example. There, archaeologists led by Jane Humphris discovered iron production evidence, on a significant scale, that date to at least the seventh or sixth century BC. More archaeological excavations show that iron production continued for more than a thousand years. Heaps of iron slag estimated to be around 5,000 tons, still exist in Meroë today, marking it as one of the largest and longest-lived ironmaking centres on the continent. Early writers called it the 'Birmingham of Africa.'
Similarly, iron smelting activities have been found on the western shore of Lake Victoria, in today's Tanzania, where the ancestors of the Haya people are believed to have been smelting iron since about 300 BC. In the 1970s the archaeologists Peter Schmidt and Donald Avery found that their furnaces preheated the air entering the smelting chamber, using clay pipes run through the heart of the furnace, helping them reach temperatures of about 1,350 to 1,400 degrees Celsius. Their research challenges assumptions that sophisticated metallurgical techniques were exclusive to Europe and demonstrates the technological ingenuity of African ironworkers.
Textile Production in Pre-Colonial Africa
By the nineteenth century, the most developed manufacturing in sub-Saharan Africa was in cloth and its largest centre was in Kano, one of the largest Hausa cities of the Sokoto Caliphate. In the dyeing town of Kura alone, which was located near Kano, about two thousand of its eight thousand inhabitants were dyers in 1909. Division of labour was key to this production and much of it had similar organisational structures to Europe's workshops. Spinners, weavers, dyers, beaters and embroiderers each undertook a stage of the work. Historian Philip Shea, through his work, revealed that Kano's dyers built larger, cemented vats to cut their costs, a classic feature of economy of scale.
It is also important to discuss how this thriving trade withstood a competition that was supposed to destroy it. During the nineteenth century, European factories flooded the African coast competing with African textiles. Yet, as the economic historian Katharine Frederick notes, local manufacturers in much of West Africa persisted well into the postcolonial period, because imported cloth did not meet the varied tastes of African buyers and local cloth was often considered more durable and more beautiful.
Africa Built its own Factories
In the nineteenth century, three different African rulers watched European machines and decided to build their own.
The first was Muhammad Ali, who ruled Egypt from 1805 to 1848. In the 1820s, Ali's state began expanding cotton cultivation across the Nile Delta. In 1829, the state opened a dockyard and an arsenal at Alexandria and even built textile mills, ironworks and paper mills, some with steam engines and locally made boilers. By the 1830s, Ali's enterprise already owned a significant number of cotton mills. Opposed to strictly commercial sales, he aimed to clothe and arm a modern army and navy with his factories. Unfortunately, Ali's factories ran on state monopolies and forced labour and many of them never even profited. Eventually, these large scale enterprises failed woefully and the failure came partly as a result of interfering powers from Britain and the Ottoman Empire through an 1838 trade treaty (Convention of Balta Liman) that outlawed monopolies. In 1841, European powers successfully limited Egypt's army to 18,000 men and without the army's orders, much of Ali's industry withered.
Queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar was another ruler who pursued domestic manufacturing as a means of strengthening her kingdom and reducing its dependence on foreign imports. Reigning from 1828 to 1861, she expanded the policies of economic self-sufficiency begun under her predecessor, Radama I. Her government sought to produce essential goods within Madagascar, particularly military supplies that would strengthen the Merina kingdom against external threats.
In the 1830s and 1840s, her government employed the French adventurer, craftsman and engineer, Jean Laborde to build an industrial complex at Mantasoa, in the highlands east of the capital. He arrived in Madagascar in 1832 and entered the queen's service. He was first commissioned to manufacture firearms which he succeeded at through the establishment of workshops at Ilafy before developing a much larger manufacturing complex at Mantasoa, east of the capital, Antananarivo. By the late 1830s and early 1840s, the complex included furnaces, forges, and workshops producing cannons, muskets, gunpowder, porcelain, glass, soap, textiles, swords, bricks, tiles, silk and other manufactured goods. As a result, for a while, Madagascar successfully reduced its reliance on imported European products for these needs.
However, the human cost of Madagascar's scale of production was huge. Labour was often mobilised through fanompoana, a system of compulsory unpaid service to the state. Workers were conscripted into manufacturing and other state projects, while the kingdom's economic policies restricted foreign commercial influence.
Ranavalona's industry faced considerable challenges. For example, transporting raw materials and finished goods was expensive while workers had limited material incentives. The compulsory labour also encouraged some to flee or resist. These problems continuously weakened the industrial programme, despite the number of goods it produced.
Another significant challenge the industry faced came through Laborde. In 1857, Laborde was expelled from Madagascar following his involvement in a failed plot against Ranavalona I. His departure weakened the industrial programme, which depended heavily on his technical expertise and leadership. In February 2018, the former industrial site of Mantasoa was added to Madagascar's UNESCO Tentative List for potential World Heritage status.
Then there was Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia, who sought to manufacture modern weapons within his own empire rather than remain dependent on foreign imports. During his rule between 1855 and 1868, Tewodros recognised that Ethiopia's military strength partly depended on its ability to produce its own firearms and artillery, especially after his attempts to obtain weapons abroad were hampered by regional rivalries and restrictions on importation. So he turned to foreign craftsmen who could help him establish domestic production.
In 1855, Tewodros accepted an offer from Samuel Gobat, the Protestant bishop of Jerusalem, to send a group of technically trained missionaries from Switzerland's Chrischona Institute. Tewodros settled these missionaries at Gafat, near Debre Tabor, where more European artisans joined them.
Initially, the group worked on repairing firearms and making tools. In 1861, the emperor ordered them to begin producing artillery, including mortars and their ammunition. Although the missionaries lacked experience in casting such weapons, they eventually succeeded with the assistance of other foreign craftsmen and Ethiopian labourers. One of the most famous products of the foundry was a massive mortar named Sebastopol which was completed around 1867 and weighed approximately seven tonnes. After it was created, it took six months to drag it about two hundred miles to his mountain fortress at Magdala. Historical accounts credit Gafat with producing approximately 35 to 37 cannons and mortars.
Tewodros' ambition also extended beyond manufacturing individual weapons to equipping Ethiopians with the techniques, skills and knowledge they need to sustain production themselves. Despite this, the foundry struggled to develop into a lasting industrial enterprise. The scarcity of specialised equipment, the difficulty of obtaining materials, internal political opposition, and the emperor's eventual conflict with Britain all constrained his ambition. In April 1868, British forces captured Magdala during their expedition against Tewodros II. The emperor died by suicide on 13 April, bringing his reign to an end. The fall of his regime also ended the Gafat experiment as a sustained state arms-making programme.
The Reason Behind the Failure of Africa's Factories
Study the three state-led industrial experiments and one would discover that they had much in common. All depended heavily on state patronage, and all were closely connected to rulers' ambitions to strengthen their political and military power. They also relied on specialised technical knowledge, which in these cases included expertise brought in from abroad. Their long-term development was disrupted by different combinations of political conflict, foreign intervention, resource constraints and institutional weaknesses. Each just so happens to also have been cut short by a treaty, a conspiracy or an invading army from external forces before they could become self-sufficient.
Other obstacles presented themselves across the continent. For instance, economic historian Gareth Austin argues that much of pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa was characterised by relatively abundant land and limited labour, although conditions varied considerably across regions. In many areas, access to land reduced the incentive for people to sell their labour on terms that benefited employers. These conditions influenced the cost and organisation of production. Differences in population density, transport infrastructure, energy supplies, access to capital and the size of local markets also encouraged different forms of labour mobilisation and made it harder to reproduce the labour arrangements that developed in parts of industrialising Europe.
Later, colonial economic policies in many territories reinforced dependence on the export of primary commodities and the importation of manufactured goods. These arrangements constrained some forms of local industrial development, although their effects varied across the continent. Together, these factors help explain why evidence of sophisticated production and ambitious state-led manufacturing did not automatically translate into sustained, mechanised industrialisation.
None of this means Africa lacked the skill or the ambition. The smiths of Meroë and Kemondo Bay, the dyers of Kano and the engineers of Mantasoa in fact, show that African societies possessed considerable metallurgical knowledge, manufacturing skills and technical ambition. What remains to be explained is why these achievements did not lead to sustained, mechanised industrialisation on the scale seen in parts of Europe. Access to energy, the size and structure of markets, capital, labour arrangements, political institutions and external intervention all formed part of that history, but their relative importance differed across societies.
So here is the uncomfortable question. If Muhammad Ali's mills or Ranavalona's foundries had been given another fifty years to develop, would we now be discussing them as the beginnings of Africa's industrial revolution? Or were the economic, technological and political obstacles already too great? The surviving evidence cannot give us a definitive answer. It can, however, remind us that the absence of a sustained industrial revolution was not the same thing as an absence of manufacturing ability, technological knowledge or ambition.
