Ghana and Mali: Rise, Organisation and Decline

1The source: a description from far away

Around 1068 the scholar al-Bakri, working in Córdoba in Muslim Spain, completed his Book of Routes and Realms. He never crossed the Sahara; he gathered reports from merchants who had. He described the capital of Ghana as two towns about 10 kilometres apart: one inhabited by Muslim merchants, the other by the king of Ghana.

In 1913 a 17th-century West African chronicle naming the capital "Koumbi" led French archaeologists to ruins at Koumbi Saleh, in today's Mauritania. They found a large Muslim town with stone houses and a congregational mosque. They have not found the king's town, and no inscription proves the site was Ghana's capital.

Read the two sources together. The text and the ruins agree that a Muslim merchant town stood here, but each has limits. Al-Bakri wrote at second hand, for readers in Spain and North Africa. The archaeology confirms the Muslim town but is silent about the king. Most written evidence for West Africa's early empires comes from outsiders writing in Arabic; the people's own memory survives mainly in oral tradition, kept by griots. A historian needs both.

2The setting

3Ghana (Wagadu): to the 13th century

The Soninke called their state Wagadu; "Ghana" was a royal title that Arab writers used for the king, his capital and his kingdom. Its roots go back to farming and herding chiefdoms in the western Niger basin more than a thousand years before Christ.

• Rise and economy. Ghana grew rich by holding a monopoly over gold going north and salt going south, even though it did not control the gold fields themselves. Another title of its kings was Kaya Maghan, "king of gold". In the 10th century al-Masudi described the king as supreme over vassal rulers and the kingdom as important because of gold.
• Organisation. A king with vassal rulers under him; a capital of two towns, one royal and one for Muslim merchants. Al-Bakri reports that the king's interpreters, his treasurer and most of his ministers were Muslims: literate Muslim officials served a king who kept the older religion, and Ghana as a country converted to Islam only around 1076. Trade came before conversion.
• Decline. As the Sahel dried, trade shifted south to the Niger and west to the Senegal river. Awdaghust, a seat of the king, fell to the Almoravids, a Berber Muslim movement, in 1054. By the 13th century Ghana had become a vassal of the rising Mali Empire.

A historians' debate. An old story says the Almoravids conquered Ghana in 1076–77. Modern scholars have sharply questioned it: Conrad and Fisher (1982) called it folklore built on a misreading of Arabic sources, and the first writer even to hint at a conquest, Ibn Khaldun, wrote 300 years later. Others accept Almoravid political pressure without a conquest. The lesson: a date repeated in many textbooks may rest on weak evidence.

4Mali: c. 1235 to 1610

• Rise. Mali grew in the 11th and 12th centuries as Ghana declined. Its founder, Sundiata Keita (c. 1217 to c. 1255), united the Mande clans and defeated the Sosso king Soumaoro Kanté at the Battle of Kirina in about 1235. Oral tradition says an assembly at Kouroukan Fouga then gave the empire its laws; UNESCO inscribed "the Manden Charter, proclaimed in Kurukan Fuga" on its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2009. Mali controlled the gold of Bambuk and Bure and taxed the salt trade.
• Organisation. The mansa (emperor) ruled from the heartland. Conquered kings who submitted became farbas and governed their old kingdoms in the mansa's name, keeping most of their authority, while the mansa could remove them or raise armies in their lands. Audiences with the mansa followed strict rules of protocol.
• Height. Mansa Musa (ruled c. 1312 to 1337) made his pilgrimage to Mecca from 1324 to 1326; his spending of gold caused inflation in Egypt. He annexed Timbuktu peacefully in 1324 and turned Sankore into an Islamic university. Forty years after his reign Mali still controlled about 1,100,000 square kilometres.
• Decline. After Mansa Suleyman's death the "Golden Age" ended. Mali lost Timbuktu to the Tuareg in 1433–34; the Songhai took it in 1468. From 1507 neighbouring states chipped away at Mali's borders, and a defeat outside Djenné in 1599 ended its last hopes of revival.