When the African story is told or imagined, it is often riddled with testimonies of a depraved society that was in urgent need of help and reformation. For the voices behind these stories, help ultimately came in the form of the colonisers, without whom Africa would ultimately have remained nothing.
We beg to tell a different truth, as must already be familiar to readers of the myriad cultural retellings we have published across Africa Rebirth over the past decade; from the ancient civilisations and churches of Ethiopia to the rigours of the inland and overseas slave systems that plagued the continent for centuries.
In this retelling, we tell a distinct story that acknowledges the social inequalities that existed long before colonial rule. Just like many social structures, some owned immense wealth, commanded vast territories and enjoyed privileges reserved for the powerful, while others lived rather average lives or in poverty and servitude. Africa, like other parts of the world, was a continent of unequal fortunes, where wealth and hardship existed side by side. Pre-colonial Africa contained some of the most equal societies ever recorded and some of the most unequal. What makes this reality interesting is not just how much inequality the continent had but what inequality was made of.
Wealth in Africa: A Case Study of Societal Life in the Shashe-Limpopo Basin
Two stories are often told about wealth in Africa before colonial rule. In one, pre-colonial societies were broadly equal, and inequality arrived with the colonisers. In the other, everyone was equally poor. The economic historians Ewout Frankema, Michiel de Haas and Marlous van Waijenburg, in a 2023 study of inequality in Africa over the long run, reject the first story outright. The second does not survive a walk up Mapungubwe hill, an archaeological site discovered in 1932.
The Shashe-Limpopo basin, a region in South Africa, is known for its many firsts: first town, first stone-walled palace, first capital, and the first king. Between AD 900 and AD 1300, the region produced the first complex society known to southern Africa. As the author, Thomas Huffman, puts it, it was characterised by sacred leadership and distinct social classes.
From the Shashe-Limpopo basin, three capitals rose fast and strong, each representing different eras: the Schroda (AD 900 - AD 1000), K2 (AD 1000 - AD 1220) and finally the focus of this section of our article, Mapungubwe (AD 1220 - AD 1300). Mapungubwe would eventually lay the foundations for the rise of Great Zimbabwe, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located approximately 200 kilometres away, through its political, economic, and social developments. By the 15th century, the form of complex society created at Mapungubwe had spread across a territory roughly the size of France.
What was this complex society like? It was a society in which cattle was herded, farming was a lifestyle and pottery was indispensable. In this society, the chief was the only one permitted to be the wealthiest in the chiefdom. Oftentimes, his wealth accumulation came in the form of cattle obtained through court fines, tributes, forfeits, raids and perhaps, the high bride price of his daughters. The chief's wealth also enabled him to have more wives, fields, followers and court officials.
The rise of Mapungubwe in 1220 gives us better insight into the wealth of the region. Specifically around the year 1250, on a sandstone hill above the Limpopo River, the rulers of Mapungubwe buried their dead with gold. This reality was only just discovered in 1932, when archaeologists dug up a gold wrapped wooden rhinoceros sculpture from one of its royal graves. Further excavation projects on the same hill led to the discovery of 23 graves filled with gold, copper jewelry, exotic glass beads and golden animals like the rhino, further revealing the extent of Mapungubwe's wealth. The exotic glass beads and Chinese ceramics, which were found in large quantities, point to an international trade that occurred through Swahili ports on the Indian Ocean coast.
Accounts from the Portuguese describe how the monsoon winds directed these trades. Ivory, Rhino horn, iron, gold and leopard skins were often collected inland and taken to coastal stations in Mozambique where Arab or Swahili sailing vessels took them up to Mogadishu. After taxation, these accounts reveal that easterly monsoon winds were taken advantage of to Arabia and India where the goods were exchanged for glass beads, silk cloths, cotton and glazed ceramics. To bring them back, reverse monsoon winds were also taken advantage of back to Mogadishu where they were taxed again and taken back inland. All these were controlled, for about a hundred years, by the Zhizo people of the Shashe-Limpopo area.
So, yes, wealth indeed existed in precolonial Africa and just like other societies, it created inequalities. The Mapungubwe rulers, for instance, were known for a ruling culture that separated them from the masses they led. Rulers lived on the hilltop while the several thousand people they ruled lived at the foot of the same hill. Archaeologists have described Mapungubwe as the earliest known place in southern Africa where leaders lived physically apart from their followers.
Wealth In Africa: Its People
Across the African continent, land was plentiful but people were scarce. The economic historian Gareth Austin describes sub-Saharan Africa in particular, as having "an abundance of land relative to labour." Consequently, output was limited by the number of hands available to work, especially on farmlands, and not by the number of acres available.
The abundance of land meant anyone could clear new land and cultivate it. In circumstances where enough hands could be obtained to till the land, the likelihood of much of the produce going to waste was too high as most people tended to engage in subsistence farming to feed their family. This changed what it meant to be rich in precolonial Africa. In an era where anyone could clear new land, owning a great estate did not make you powerful because no one needed to work it for you.
Hiring labour was expensive for the same reason: a worker could always go and farm for himself. Hence, wealth was determined by the accumulation of scarce commodities and 'people' were a part of these scarce commodities.
A great man was often measured by his wives and children, his clients and followers, his pawns and, in many places, the people he owned. Yes, 'owned' as in slavery. The more of these things a man owned, the greater he was deemed. Wealth in people could be turned into wealth in things, such as gold, cloth, cattle and plantations, and back again. But it meant that inequality in Africa was above all inequality in power over other human beings.
The rich accumulated what was actually scarce, which was people.
The Greater of the Greatest
As can be found in almost all societies, there are elites; those who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, power, privilege, or specialised skill. In precolonial Africa, elites existed and they constituted the greatest cadres of social and economic life.
In societies well known for their trading activities, these elites amassed enormous fortunes. Take, for example, Mansa Musa who ruled the Mali Empire in West Africa from approximately 1312 to 1337, during the 14th century. His wealth was closely tied to the empire's control of gold and its participation in the trans-Saharan trade, which connected West African markets to North Africa and the wider Mediterranean world.
In 1324, Mansa made a pilgrimage to Mecca, during which he distributed such quantities of gold that according to Egyptian official, al-Umari, its value fell in Egypt. A measure of gold that had never sold for less than 25 silver dirhams fetched 22 silver dirhams or less for years after Mansa left the region. Few rulers anywhere have moved a market by shopping.
Yet again, we see this wealth distribution in Great Zimbabwe, where rulers lived and worshiped behind walls of dressed stone, eating from Chinese porcelain and wearing gold. The elite's wealth came from controlling the trade route that carried gold from the Zimbabwean plateau to the Swahili coast while most of the city's people, perhaps 10,000 at its height, lived in houses of mud and timber outside the walls.
Control of trade was the usual route to great wealth. Whoever held the river crossing, the desert well, the market town or the coast could tax everything that passed. Gold, ivory, salt, cloth and, increasingly, human beings all moved through hands in the region.
Those at the Bottom of the Economic Divide
As mentioned above, slaves were a major source of wealth during the precolonial era. In many of the African societies of the time, it was the most valuable form of wealth. Frankema and his colleagues note that the share of unfree people was substantial especially in the nineteenth century. In 1904, a French census of West Africa showed that between 30 and 50 percent of the population was enslaved. In the Sokoto Caliphate of northern Nigeria, historians estimate that slaves made up between a quarter and a half of the population — at least two million people and perhaps two and a half million by 1900 — many of them working on plantations for officials and merchants.
This is the sharpest answer to the myth of an egalitarian past. A society in which a third of the population can be bought and sold is not equal, however the land is held. The Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades even made it worse. Kingdoms, warrior elites and people with warriors at their command, captured kin, family, friends and strangers and sold them as captives, enriching themselves with the proceeds.
Egalitarian African Communities
When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man.
Many African societies also built deliberate brakes on how far wealth could go in the hands of a few persons. At one end were the Ju/'hoansi hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, among the most equal societies anthropologists have studied. When a hunter brought in a large animal, his companions made a point of mocking it as thin and worthless. An elder explained the custom to the anthropologist Richard Lee: "When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man." The teasing, he said, was how they cooled the hunter's heart and made him gentle.
Some kingdoms used other tools. In the Asante kingdom, present-day Ghana, men who amassed great fortunes could earn titles and prestige, but their wealth was subject to the authority of the state, even after death. A ruler, on the other hand, was expected to accumulate on behalf of the state.
However, when a rich man died, the state could claim a portion of his self-acquired wealth under a practice called awunnyade, commonly translated as a death duty. The ruler could subsequently redistribute portions of the estate to the deceased's heirs or other recipients. A related levy, ayibuadie, could also be imposed on houses and land. These customs limited an individual's ability to pass accumulated wealth directly to their descendants and helped prevent private fortunes from becoming entirely independent of the state.
The practice reflected an Asante understanding of wealth that extends beyond personal enrichment. Accumulation was associated with social standing and the ability to contribute to the kingdom's continued prosperity and power. The ruler's claim over the wealth of the dead was therefore connected to the relationship between individual success, the state, and the continuity of the kingdom. Notably, under Asantehene, Kwaku Dua Panin, who reigned from 1834 to 1867, seizures and confiscations became particularly rampant.
Among the Akan states of present-day Ghana, including the Asante Confederation, and in the Kingdom of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, wealth also carried obligations. Chiefs in particular, were expected to give. Historian Vladimir Popov identifies annual festivals such as the Akan Odwira and Dahomey's Anun'gbome as important occasions for collecting tribute and gifts and redistributing wealth. During these celebrations, rulers displayed their riches and distributed goods to courtiers, chiefs, and other subjects, reinforcing political ties and demonstrating their authority. Generosity was therefore an important expression of chiefly status. A ruler who hoarded wealth risked weakening the loyalties on which his power depended, and in a world of wealth in people, a chief without followers was not rich at all.
Yet, these traditions couldn't altogether prevent the accumulation of wealth. Rather, they only successfully mitigated its extremity.
Conclusion
Today, there is hardly any quantitative evidence of social inequality in Africa. As economic historians Ewout Frankema, Michiel de Haas, and Marlous van Waijenburg explain, reliable estimates of income and wealth distribution are difficult to reconstruct for periods before colonial record-keeping became more extensive. The earliest available estimates for many African societies therefore come from the colonial era. This scarcity of numerical evidence, however, should not be mistaken for evidence that inequality did not exist. Historical accounts of wealthy rulers and merchants, systems of tribute, the accumulation of gold and other resources, and the enslavement of human beings all reveal significant differences in wealth, status, and access to power across African societies. The challenge is not to establish whether inequality existed, but to understand how it varied between societies, how it was sustained, and how it changed over time.
Archaeologists, on the other hand, are trying a different route. In a 2024 study, the archaeologists Siteleki and Fredriksen measured the sizes of homesteads in three large Tswana-speaking towns in the Magaliesberg region of South Africa, built between the 1650s and the 1820s, and calculated a standard inequality score, the Gini coefficient, for each. The results ranged from about 0.40 at Marothodi to about 0.67 at Kaditshwene, where 0 would mean every homestead was the same size and 1 that a single household held everything. But the authors caution that house size may reflect how exposed a town was to attack as much as how rich its families were.
The honest summary is that inequality in pre-colonial Africa was real, varied enormously from place to place, and was built from different materials than in Europe or Asia. It ran through control of people more than ownership of land, and through command of trade routes more than great landed estates, and it was often checked by customs of giving, levies on the dead and rules about how the powerful should behave. Some societies held those checks firmly. Others, especially those enriched by the slave trade, threw them off.
So here is the uncomfortable question. If wealth was measured in people, was a generous chief with many dependents a sign of a fairer society, or simply a different kind of inequality? And which pre-colonial system would you rather have been born into, if you did not know whether you would be born at the top or the bottom?
