At the same time as the stock of silver was increasing so rapidly in Europe, the stock of gold was increasing in Africa. The process had begun very much earlier than the European discoveries of silver at Freiberg and Montieri, for a little gold was already crossing the Sahara in the eighth century. It began to do so in considerable quantities at the end of the tenth century, and continued to do so, almost uninterruptedly, until the fifteenth century.

Trans-Saharan trade was very unevenly balanced. From the north, traders carried both Egyptian and, later, European textiles, glass, particularly glass beads, spices and sometimes copper. On the most westerly route they were able to purchase the all-important salt at Taghaza on the way, and on the easterly routes they could pick up further copper at Takedda. On returning to the north, the trans-Saharan caravans took with them ivory, ebony, sometimes copper from Takedda, and from the fourteenth century, malaguetta pepper (or grains of paradise). They also took with them large numbers of slaves who had been seized by the rulers of the successive savannah kingdoms of Ghana and of Mali in raids on their southern forest-dwelling neighbours. Ibn Battuta, on his return to the Maghreb in 1353, travelled with a slave-trader who was crossing the desert with 600 women. The northern goods were so highly prized that in the markets of the south they greatly exceeded the value put on local commodities.