Public health among historical African Kingdoms and empires.

I only find something about water and sanitation system.

- Thread about water supply and sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa​

- Kumasi and other African sewage system

- The Ancient Gedi Ruins Of swahiliCoast​

Located in Kenya’s Kilifi Country, on the shores of the Indian Ocean, buried in the lush, green forests of the country, archaeologists have discovered ruins of a 13th Century town.

Sundiata1 said:

Gede, or Gedi was an 11th to 17th century Swahili stone town, on the Kenyan mainland, not far from the coast. It's larger than Songo Mnara and its ruins are equally well preserved. Gedi is an almost magical place, traditionally believed to be haunted by the locals. Even though its equally well excavated and popular with tourists, to my surprise, it hasn't properly featured in this thread yet either. After more than a year of posting, I'm still just picking low hanging fruit here...

Paraphrasing some parts of the Wiki page, which is a short but good read:

Gedi was a small but prosperous city, with a wealth of stone architecture of excellent craftsmanship. The 18 hectare site featured a palace, 8 mosques, numerous stone houses, pillar tombs and an inner and an outer wall, which seemed to be more about social demarcation than they were defensive (though there are loopholes through the inner walls. Between the two walls there was a dense concentration of mud and thatch houses that haven't been preserved. There was also occupation beyond the walls, as well as a number of satellite settlements, some with their own stone houses and mosque, that would have provided Gedi with agricultural produce. As with other Swahili settlements, the stone houses featured indoor toilets and washing facilities. From the excavated remains of imports like porcelain, and coins, we know that Gedi had trade connections with Yemen, Persia, India, Thailand and China. Their economy was based on livestock, agriculture and horticulture, including millet, African rice, cocoyam, coconuts, bananas, citrus fruits, pomegranates, figs, sugar cane, cotton, and various vegetables, cattle, sheep, goats, and chickens as well as pottery production, metal working, construction, spinning and weaving cloth, fishing, trade, and possibly the production of salt. Swahili coastal settlements in general exported gold, ivory, slaves, ebony, mangrove poles, copper, copal gum, frankincense, myrrh, and crystal rock.

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The palace:


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Remains of an indoor toilet on the left:

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- MEROE's Royal Bath architecture (blog article)​

- Old Dongola - WorldHistory :
The area around Dongola was inhabited from at least 6000 BCE, with pottery finds being radiocarbon dated to c. 5000 BCE.
The settlement of Old Dongola grew from the 6th century CE and was located on the River Nile bend between the third and fourth cataract in what is today northern Sudan. The kingdom prospered thanks to the use of the water wheel (saqia), which irrigated land previously unsuitable for agriculture.

In the 7th century CE, Old Dongola boasted two large Christian churches built in a Nubian version of the Byzantine basilica.
Besides the remains of two more churches, the city also boasted a city wall, houses and wide streets. A baked red-brick two-storey palace, once with domes, dates to c. 1002 CE, while most ordinary housing was constructed using unbaked mud bricks. These estates spread over an area of some 35 hectares or 350,000 square metres at Old Dongola. Housing may have used simple materials but many that have been excavated, which date to the 9th century CE, have their own bathroom, water supply, and heating system.




GAO Saney old palace


The strategic importance of Gao did not diminish during the historical period. Early Arabic texts concerning Bilād al-Sūdān never fail to mention it.
- The text of al-Khuwārizmī written before his death in 846-847, which is the oldest extant document referring to West Africa, cites Gao1 as one of the mains towns of West Africa, together with Ghāna and Zaghawa (Levtzion & Hopkins 1981: 8).
- According to al-Ya’qūbī who wrote in 872-873, Gao was “the greatest of the realms of the Sūdān, the most important and powerful. All the kingdoms obey its king. Al-Kawkaw is the name of the town” (ibid.: 21).

- Excavations in Gao-Ancient have continued year in year out since 2003 with some interruptions. The eastern wing of the big building was finally uncovered to reveal four ranged walls 36 m long. These walls are 2.5 m apart, with the right wing measuring 12.5 m from front to back. If the left wing has the same length as the right wing, the total length of this building will be 73 m.

On the north boundary was found another building containing some rooms. This building, or rather residence, is smaller than the other. Its main room is 11 m long and 5.5 m wide, with walls 0.5 m thick made with flat schist slabs (Fig. 10). Inside the room are seen two ranges of columns made of smaller schist slabs (Fig. 11).

Two layers of white and red plaster are painted inside the walls, meaning that this room must have been very beautifully decorated. This residence contains two other rooms, one of which is a bathroom equipped with a drain pipe under a corner of the floor made of pebbles (Fig. 12).

Webster said:

Please is there more information about the policies and philosophies regarding public health in pre-colonial African civilizations?

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Right now one of the things I can recall is that in the 17th century, Muḥammad al-Wālī, a scholar of Fulani origin from Baghirmi, a state which was at that time a vassal of Bornu, advocated against smoking tobacco in his work Al-adilla al-ḥisān fī bayān taḥrīm shurb al-dukhān (Valid Proofs to Proclaim Smoking Forbidden).

Dorrit van Dalen has included a translation of and commentary on this work by al-Wali in her book Doubt, Scholarship and Society in 17th Century Central Sudanic Africa (2016). A preview of her comments and translation below:



You can read more about al-Wali and his views on tobacco in these articles by van Dalen:

Muḥammad al-Wālī b. Sulaymān b. Abī Muḥammad al-Wālī al-Fulānī al-Baghirmāwī al-Barnāwī al-Ashʿarī al-Mālikī (fl. 1688) was a religious scholar in Baghirmī, a vassal-state of Bornū in central sudanic Africa, who was most famous for his elaboration of a commentary on Yūsuf al-Sanūsī’s (d. 895/1490) Al-ʿaqīda al-ṣughra.

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In the seventeenth century, tobacco was fiercely debated from England to Istanbul. Muslim scholars from Bornu and Baghirmi participated in this debate and maintained that smoking was forbidden by divine law, long after their counterparts in the heartlands of Islam allowed it. The question addressed here is why and how the adamant rejection of tobacco in central sudanic Africa was formulated. The study is based on a number of Arabic manuscripts from the region and focuses on a treatise, written around 1700, by Muḥammad al- Wālī b. Sulaymān. It is argued that he was as much inspired by the popular opinion about tobacco in his home- environment as by the writings of scholars from the Middle East. In folktales, tobacco was literally demonised, and the rejection of “pagan” smokers helped to mark new social boundaries. The dominant position regarding smoking was the result of an exchange between islamic learning and popular culture in the region.

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There is certainly more information about public health policies and philosophy in the Islamic or Sahelian states in Africa than just that particular example, but that is one of the things that I recall most easily right now as far as a philosophy about public health.



In the kingdom of Benin there was a considerable soap-making industry; the soap they made was described this way in the late sixteenth century:

"They have good store of sope, and it smelleth like beaten violets." - James Welsh, 1588

The soap made in Benin was described a little over a century later at the beginning of the 18th century by David van Nyendal:

"The Negroes here make Soap, which is better than all over Guinea; and by reason this washes very well, the Negroes Cloaths are very clean. You know it is made upon the Gold-Coast with Palm-Oil, Banana Leaves and the Ashes of a sort of Wood. The manner of making it here differs very little." - David Van Nyendael, 1702

It would take some time to dig up information about other states and their health practices, policies, etc. but I'll return to the thread when I remember more.

I recall reading something about inoculation being practiced in parts of West Africa. Maybe this article: Smallpox inoculation in Africa | The Journal of African History | Cambridge Core

Ighayere said:

Right now one of the things I can recall is that in the 17th century, Muḥammad al-Wālī, a scholar of Fulani origin from Baghirmi, a state which was at that time a vassal of Bornu, advocated against smoking tobacco in his work Al-adilla al-ḥisān fī bayān taḥrīm shurb al-dukhān (Valid Proofs to Proclaim Smoking Forbidden).

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I did not read this, but I'll ask: does he suggest that tobacco is bad for the health? Or does he just say that the Prophet did not smoke, that tobacco is not part of the Islamic tradition, that is a habit of the infidels, and thus that it must be banned for religious reasons? If the latter, it hardly qualifies as a public health issue.

Michele A said:

I did not read this, but I'll ask: does he suggest that tobacco is bad for the health? Or does he just say that the Prophet did not smoke, that tobacco is not part of the Islamic tradition, that is a habit of the infidels, and thus that it must be banned for religious reasons? If the latter, it hardly qualifies as a public health issue.

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Yes he does say that tobacco is bad for one's health (he claims it harms the body) and also that it is filthy. He admits that it does not obscure or cloud the mind but he does argue that it causes people to engage in improper conduct or the kind of lowly behavior that "riffraff" or low-class people would engage in. So in addition to religious reasons, he had health based and societal based objections to smoking.

"Al-Wālī’s treatise against smoking clearly reflects his “double vision.” It consists of two parts.29 The first lists ten reasons why smoking is ḥarām. It does so in simple wordings, supported by a host of references to well known prophetic traditions. One could almost imagine this part being read out by a public crier in a market. The second part then continues with a polemical discussion, paragraph by paragraph, of a treatise on the acceptability of tobacco by the renowned al-Azhar scholar al-Ajhūrī, in a much more scholarly style, in which the syntax is often as complex as the legal argumentation. The general public in Baghirmi would have had no idea what it was about, and the authors referred to would have been unknown to them.

This division in the text seems puzzling, as if it were addressed to two different audiences. But that is not the case. The second part starts with the words “I have just presented ten good reasons,” a direct and unambiguous reference to the first part of the work. Because of the style of the second part, and because no copies of the text were found in West African libraries, it seems likely that the treatise as a whole was addressed to an audience of learned jurists in the Middle East, and was produced there. But the first part bears clear traces of an argument that was developed in al-Wālī’s home environment.30

In spite of the adaptation of the second part to a more intellectual audience, it is remarkable that al-Wālī does not use two arguments that would be most decisive in Islamic law as it was taught in the older centers of learning, namely that smoking would “cloud the mind” and tobacco was impure. But he knew of course that both arguments had been dealt with in the past three quarters of a century, and did not stand their ground. Even his example, al-Laqānī, had admitted that tobacco did not obscure the mind and was therefore not an intoxicant. So al-Wālī writes: “Surely, the things that necessitate its prohibition are other than absence of the mind from smoking it.”31 A bit later he says, in answer to al-Ajhūrī’s statement that tobacco is not impure, because the mind is not obscured by it, “there is no connection between a substance obscuring the mind and its being impure.”32 But he is careful enough to refrain from saying that tobacco is impure. Instead, his ten objections were that smoking was bidʿa (an unlawful innovation), it distracts the attention from religion, it stinks and harms the body, it is copying a habit of heathens (who introduced tobacco), it is filthy, it makes one drowsy (although it cannot be characterized as an intoxicant, it is still a soporific), it involves a waste of money, smoke is one of God’s punishment on the Day of Judgment (and who would want to associate with that), and smoking is “unmanly.”

All these arguments had been mentioned by others, although few listed so many in one text. But compared to others al-Wālī puts a lot of emphasis on his opinion that tobacco is filthy or disgusting, khabīth. The words khabīth and its synonyms shanī‘ and qabīḥ occur fifteen times within the first sixteen folios. Now khabīth is a word that plays a role in the Qur’an. In sura 7:157, for example, God forbids people to consume what is khabīth. A few others had called tobacco khabīth too: al-Laqānī and another very early writer on the topic, a Hanafī scholar in Medina named al-Nāfī 33 and perhaps some others, since al-Karmī reacted to it. But in neither of the four law schools is khabīth a legal category. It does not imply any sanction, as al-Karmī had already pointed out before the first quarter of the seventeenth century was over. He and others did consider tobacco karīh, disliked or repugnant, and deducted from that the legal verdict of smoking as makrūh, disapproved. But that would not have helped al-Wālī, who aimed for more, and wanted its total condemnation as ḥarām. Consequently, he does not even use the word karīh.

Al-Wālī also stresses the incompatibility of smoking with “manliness” or decency, that is, murūʾa. Murūʾa is a complex term that is associated with the honor of an individual or a tribe, with the observance of duties connected to family ties, and—notably in West Africa—with self- restraint and the control of emotions.34 Thus, when the term murū’a occurs in later35 manuscripts about smoking (Falke 1040, f 15; Falke 1101, f 19), it is in contrast with such antisocial behavior observed among smokers as fooling around and dancing, lowering oneself, being inferior for having substituted one’s brains with smoke, eating in public (all mentioned in Falke 1101 and 1040), and indulging in calumny and wild hilarious conduct (al-Fakkoun)36—in short, the behavior of riffraff (al- raʿāʿ)." - Dorrit van Dalen, "This Filthy Plant: The Inspiration of a Central Sudanic Scholar in the Debate on Tobacco" (2012)