When the Europeans first arrived on the coast of western Africa during the second half of the fifteenth century, they found conditions quite different from today. Instead of the sprawling urban centers along the coast, like Lagos, Accra, and Dakar, the centers of population in West Africa were deep in the interior, where states like old Ghana, Mali, and Kanem had controlled vast stretches of the Sahel on the Sahara desert fringes, and where Songay and Kanem-Bornu were to rise to great power status in the sixteenth century. The trade networks of West Africa converged on the caravan routes across the Sahara, which gave rise to the power of these states. By contrast, the coastal regions were thinly populated with small autonomous fishing villages, separated by an endless ethnic variety and dispersed political authority.

One exception to this coastal pattern was the city-state of Benin in south-western Nigeria. Early Dutch visitors described the town with considerable admiration and compared it to contemporary European urban centers in Holland. But on the whole, it was not until the arrival of the Portuguese that several trading centers along the Atlantic coast were developed. This gradually changed the focus of West African trade from the Sahara to the Atlantic, where it tied into the international trading network that was developed and dominated by the Europeans.