Alafin Nkem III of Guinea
Born: 1107
Reigned: 1139 - 1193
To succeed amidst the bloody excesses of the reign of Alafin Luwoo, a person of independent mind would be forced to wear a mask all at times. Nkem III was, as a young woman, quite adept at doing just that. She performed the role of the pious and deferential young princess while in her private writings she was scathing about the Orisan church and even skeptical of the existence of Ọlọrun. She realized also that the way to her father’s heart lay through the memory of Agu, so she more than any of her siblings commemorated his loss--even though he had died six years before she was born. By committing herself thoroughly to the role of the dutiful daughter and grieving sister, she alone among her siblings retained her claim on the throne. But there was a private Nkem that was far different from the person she showed in the world.
One shouldn’t take this too far, of course. Some recent accounts of Nkem’s life have presented her as an essentially modern figure with 21st century notions about equality and secularism, but this is the present projecting itself on the past. Nkem was heavily involved in the running of the empire in the final decade of Luwoo’s life, she understood the methods by which her father established his will, and she would be just as ruthless when necessity dictated. The one thing that she came to regret was the pretense. The princess who pretended to be what her people needed her to be grew into a queen who could no longer pretend.
WIth the death of Luwoo in 1039, Alafin Nkem III was faced with an immediate crisis. Her brother-in-law, the Sunni emir of Toledo, had conspired to seize the throne of Guinea in his wife’s name. To find local support for this initiative, his agents had been free with their promises with disgruntled lords, specifically when it came to feudal taxes. Funanya and later Luwoo had successfully raised taxes on many of their vassals over time, and now the lords were promised a return to the status quo after the promulgation of the Nigerian Code. This message resonated the most with the nanas of Igboland, who lived close to the imperial capital in Igbo-Ukwu and thus felt the heavy hand of the alafin.
So when the warriors of Toledo raised their banners for the woman they referred to as Sultana Nkechinyere, the Igbo lords rose with them. The rebellion was stymied by the impossibility of coordinating army movements a thousand miles apart, however, while the imperial forces were, as ever, more unified and disciplined than their opponents. The emir would finally admit defeat in the spring of 1143.
With the rebellion quashed, Nkem proved what she had learned from her father. She had the Igbo rebels thrown into the dungeon. There they would be subject to the most innovative methods of torture that her father had devised in a long career. Each would be obliged in this fashion to renounce their claim to their family lands and return it to the Alafin. Those who had done so were cast off to spend their typically short lives in penniless exile.
The whole of Igboland had not been under the personal control of a single ruler since the days of Nri-Alike nearly three centuries before. Nkem took full advantage, launching a campaign of building that would put her predecessors to shame. Soon market towns and monasteries dotted the countryside. By the end of the 12th century, the whole of Igboland was as wealthy and urbanized as the Italian peninsula in the same period. This had the happy consequence of boosting the imperial income and doubling the size of the army Nkem could command, and she had ample use for both.
Nkem was dreaming of conquest, and she had her eye on the empire of Mali. Kaya Magha Bomou Cisse had succeeded in conquering nearly all of Ghana, and now ruled over an empire that extended up the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Maghreb. For all that, Mali had some hidden weaknesses. Bomou had lost too many veterans during his wars of conquest, and had replaced them with raw recruits, primarily young boys or old men. His hold on the economic heartland of Akwar was weak, and while he held to the Bidaic practices of his ancestors, Sunni Islam had a strong following in his lands.
Knowing the increasing militancy of the Orisan faith, Nkem declared a holy war for the lands in the traditional kingdom of Jenne. The High Shaman offered her enthusiastic backing, and the Orisan faithful lined up in droves to bring the light of Ọlọrun to the benighted masses. And yet even as she fanned the flames of religious crusade, Nkem was privately cynical. At a feast at the imperial palace, she was overheard remarking that the òrìṣàs must be feeble indeed if they needed so many swords to accomplish their will. The high shaman stammered in outrage, but Nkem only shrugged. “It takes a great many fools to build an empire, but I see no reason why we should be among them.”
The great holy war for Jenne was short-lived. The Guinean army met Bomou’s forces in the province of Soum for a bloody confrontation, costing thousands of lives on each side. Remarkably, however, the great warrior-prince Kaya Magha Bomou was knocked from his horse during a late afternoon charge. Out of breath with his sword knocked out of his hand, Bomou found himself the prisoner of three Yoruba farmboys. At a stroke, they had won Nkem’s war for her.
With the victory came new possibilities. A few of Boumo’s enemies among the Ghanian nobility had used the civil war to flee over the border and seek shelter in Guinea. One young noblewoman, Djenly Cisse-Bena, could trace her lineage back to the emperors of Mali via the male line, giving her an undeniable claim on the throne of Mali. Intrigued, Nkem invited her to court for a woman-to-woman chat. Djenly proved to be quite willing to marry Nkem’s son Apia and worship Nkem’s god if it meant that she could have her patrimony. The alafin proposed that she do just that.
While Nkem had freely admitted her own cynicism about religion, she was also the first to admit that it had its uses. She had continued to patronize the Daughters of Ekwensu, choosing only to restrict them to foreign potentates. In 1154, they repeated their great feat by murdering the Basileus of Byzantium. With the child Demetrios II on the throne, Raphail the Foolish, the ambitious Despot of Hellas, launched a war for the throne of Constantinople. But once again Nkem shocked the world, by admitting to the murder two years later in open court. Relations between Igbo-Ukwu and Constantinople, never warm in the first place, would never recover.
In 1160, Nkem encouraged the militancy of the Orisan church even further by funding the creation off the Guardians of Heaven, an order of one thousand holy warriors based out of Nnedi who maintained monastic discipline and swore themselves to fight the heathen wherever possible. Their Grandmistress, Ekwefi, described the order as a bulwark against the encroachment of Greek Christianity. In practice, they were primarily hired for internal squabbles, as Orisan nobles in Guinea sought to undermine their Bidaic and Akom worshipping rivals. In this way, they were a crucial part of the Orisanization of West Africa during the twelfth century.
On March 29, 1171, Nkem launched her second great war against Mali, to install her daughter-in-law on the throne of Mali. Bomou had died in the intervening years, leaving the throne in the hands of his ten year old son Cissi. Cissi could command at most a third of the men that Guinea had. Nkem was so confident that she led the initial attack herself, easily defeating the Malinese army in Cubalel near the Atlantic coast before ordering the occupation of the imperial holdings. The war lasted for two and a half years but the outcome was clear.
On October 3, 1173, Djenly Cisse-Bena was crowned Kaya Magha of Mali. Her husband Apia was Nkem’s heir, and in time their daughter Adaeke stood to inherit the whole of west Africa. The two great empires would be united at last.
While Nkem III was thrilled with this turn of events, however, many of the Malinese nobility were not. They had no interest in being ruled by a puppet empress who worshipped the Nigerian gods. Many of the Bidaic worshippers were skeptical of a woman holding the throne in the first place, much less one imposed by force by their long time rivals. A young noble, Maghan Armah Cisse, began to organize a rebellion to restore Malinese independence.
In the summer of 1174, Armah launched his rebellion. He counted among his followers the bulk of the Malinese nobility, easily outnumbering the imperial retinue. Djenly sent an urgent rider to Igbo-Ukwu, begging Nkem to ride in force. The Guinean army rode out against Mali for Nkem’s third and most destructive Malinese war.
For the first time, the two sides were evenly matched in terms of raw numbers and army quality. What’s more, the rebels were fighting in their home territory and could reinforce easily, while the Guineans were hundreds of miles from home. Accordingly, Armah sought to inflict as many casualties as possible, expecting that in time he could bleed Guinea dry. The imperial forces began the war, then, with a series of pyrrhic victories in the Malinese imperial heartland. At Namandiru, for example, they lost one thousand warriors, one out of every seven. The same happened again at Mboune. Each time the rebels retreated with Armah’s personal retinue intact, free to fight another day.
By 1178, it was plain that the imperial strategy was failing. Djenly had been too defensive and reactionary, and thus their numbers were dwindling. Prince Apia proposed a change of strategy. Taking command of the imperial army, he marched for Armah’s personal holdings and began a scorched-earth campaign. Apia had his warriors burning farms and villages and rounding up anybody of fighting age. Armah moved hastily to respond, as the prince had known that he would. The two met in the hills of Bambuk on March 13, 1179, and for once there was no retreating for rebels. That night another four thousand warriors lay dead, the bulk of Armah’s veterans among them.
That loss turned the tide, and by late summer Armah was ready to surrender. Prince Apia would not survive to see the day, however.
Indeed, by 1179, all of Nkem’s children had perished fighting Mali in one war or another. Princess Fatamouta had died in the battle of Soum in the holy war for Jenne, and Nafissa in the first push to place Djenly on the throne. In the climactic battle of Bambuk, Luwoo and Chima had died fighting rebel champions on the front lines while Apia had been shot by an arrow and died when the wound became infected. The alafin’s last surviving daughter, Ekwefi, had been held prisoner by Maghan Armah. In defeat, the rebel king had her hanged as a spiteful gesture to Nkem.
In the last years of Nkem’s reign, another concern arose. Her heir, Adaeke Nri, was approaching middle age and had yet to bear a child of her own. Once Annaeke herself died, the inheritance would have to leave the family, most likely to a Soninke relative of Djenly. Courtiers began to whisper that the conquest of Mali was the alafin’s great madness, that in her ambition, she had done nought but destroy a historic family.
The repeated tragedies and uncertainty of her last years shattered Nkem’s sense of self. Gone was the easy cynicism of her youth, and she returned to the Orisan faith with an earnest, searching attitude. As an old woman, the alafin began consulting with her shamans and communing with the òrìṣàs in a way that she once would have derided. As she slowly passed away on January 2, 1193, Nkem III prayed aloud that she would swiftly be returned to her children in the next world. It was, this time, nothing but the truth.