Here are two pictures of Surame, an abandoned city in the northwest of Nigeria. Surame was built by Kanta, a general of the Songhay army who revolted and set up his own kingdom, Kebbi. Surame was the capital of Kebbi from the early 16th century until the middle of the 18th century. The city is miles in circumference, with inner and outer walls. Other walls run between the inner and outer walls, so that if the outer walls were ever breached the attackers could be isolated. The woman standing by the remains of Kanta's palace is my wife.

Scenes from Ghana:

    Cape Coast Castle is an old slaving fort.  These forts were built by the European traders who lived in them but owned by Africans.  Before colonial times there were never two consecutive forts inhabited by traders from the same country.  African rulers would never have allowed such a dangerous concentration of power by Europeans.  Neither did the guns of these forts ever point inland, which would have been considered a hostile act.  Cannons always pointed out, or along the beach, at these forts.  In the Cape Coast Castle museum there is a set of keys and locks that were siezed by an African ruler when the European tenants didn't pay the rent on time.  The Africans took the fort back, evicted the tenants and changed the locks before renting it out to someone else.
   

brief aside: That's right, in case you hadn't figured it out, Africans participated heavily in the slave trade. I'm not pointing this out to go "See, Africans did it too!" or to argue that Africans are just as wicked and nefarious as anyone else (although of course they are) but to point out two things:
   

1) Africans are not stupid. No one could just walk in there and herd people onto ships, or even round them up with guns without getting a fight from them, a fight that that the outsiders would lose, at least until automatic weapons were invented, and Europe briefly had enough diplomatic unity not to compete in selling guns to Africans. Those conditions came into being at the time of the Congress of Berlin (1884-5) which touched off the so-called "Scramble for Africa" at the end of which the entire continent, with the exceptions of Liberia and Ethiopia, had been divided into European colonies and protectorates.
   

2) Africans did not sell their own people, unless they were criminals they wanted to get rid of. They sold the other people from next door. Pan-Africanism, the idea that Africans are a single people who should organize a political federation is very much an outside idea created by such Americans as W.E.B. DuBois and picked up by such Africans as Kwame Nkrumah. It is an idea whose time I wish would come, but which is still very alien to most Africans on the continent.

back to Africa:
   The first of these castles to have been built, the castle of Elmina, was built in 1482, before the slave trade was very significant and even before Columbus had been to America.  Columbus learned to sail working for the Portuguese, and even spent some time at this castle.  "El Mina" means "the mine" in Portuguese.  This was where the Portuguese got their gold.  In fact Ghana was known as the Gold Coast until independence in 1957.  Elmina when I first went there was a sleepy little fishing village, although I hear there is now a lot of tourist development.