Medieval West African Empires

Ghana, properly Wagadu, was ruled by the Soninke, and ghana was a royal title that Arab writers took for the country’s name. Eleventh-century geographers described it as a kingdom of great wealth whose ruler held court with gold-decorated horses and dogs in gold collars, and who could reportedly field an enormous army.

Mali’s foundation is preserved as epic rather than chronicle. The Sundiata epic, transmitted orally by griot lineages for seven centuries and only written down in the modern period, tells of a disabled prince who rose to defeat the sorcerer-king Sumanguru and found the empire. Alongside it stands the Kouroukan Fouga, an oral charter attributed to Sundiata’s assembly setting out the empire’s constitutional arrangements, social divisions and obligations.

That combination is the defining source situation here. Imperial administration is documented in oral tradition, poetry and outside Arabic accounts rather than internal chronicles, which is why historians trained to look for archives long underrated these states.

Songhai under Askia Muhammad, from 1493, is the most bureaucratically developed of the three, with provinces under appointed governors, a professional army, standardised weights and measures, a treasury, and a legal system run by Islamic jurists. Any contemporary European monarchy would have recognised the apparatus.

Sahelian warfare was built on cavalry, and cavalry depended on imported horses, North African and Arabian animals brought across the desert, since the tsetse belt to the south made horse-breeding difficult. Control of that import was a strategic matter, and the cost of maintaining mounted forces shaped the whole political economy.

Ghana’s fall illustrates the vulnerability of a state built on a trade corridor. The Almoravid movement, a militant Berber reform current from the western Sahara, disrupted the northern end of the routes in the eleventh century, and Ghana declined thereafter. The older account of a straightforward Almoravid conquest has been substantially revised, and the current view emphasises gradual pressure, commercial disruption and internal fragmentation rather than a single invasion.

Mali expanded to control the goldfields of Bambuk and Bure and the Niger’s navigable stretch, and Songhai expanded further still, taking the trading cities and pushing the empire to its greatest extent under Sonni Ali and Askia Muhammad.

The end came from an unexpected direction and by a technological margin. In 1591 a Moroccan expedition crossed the Sahara, a considerable feat in itself, carrying arquebuses and cannon, and defeated a far larger Songhai army at Tondibi. Firearms against cavalry decided it, and the empire fragmented into successor states that never reassembled it.

The trade was gold for salt, and both halves matter. West Africa had gold in quantity, and for centuries it supplied a substantial share of the gold circulating in the Mediterranean and Europe. It had almost no salt, which is a physiological necessity in a hot climate. The Sahara had salt, mined in slabs at Taghaza and elsewhere in conditions that appalled every visitor who described them.

The exchange rates that resulted sound implausible and were real. In the interior, salt could approach gold in value by weight. Ibn Battuta, visiting Taghaza in the fourteenth century, described a settlement whose houses and mosque were built from blocks of salt, worked by enslaved labourers in a place with no food and no water except what was carried in.

The camel made it possible. Introduced to the Sahara in the early centuries AD, it turned an impassable barrier into a navigable sea with ports on either shore, and the caravan routes it opened were the equivalent of the Indian Ocean monsoon in what they connected.

Copper, cloth, books, horses and enslaved people also moved in both directions, and the empires taxed all of it. The state’s revenue came from levies on trade passing through rather than from taxing production, which made control of the cities and routes the central political objective.

West African Sahelian society was organised around occupational and status categories that cut across ethnicity: noble lineages, free commoners, specialist castes of smiths, leatherworkers and griot bards, and enslaved people. The specialist categories were endogamous and hereditary, and carried a complicated status: socially set apart, often feared for their association with dangerous knowledge, and indispensable.

The griot deserves particular attention because the profession is also a source. Griots were praise-singers, genealogists, advisers and the custodians of historical memory, attached to noble families and transmitting narrative across generations by trained recitation. The Sundiata epic exists because that profession existed.

Islam arrived early and settled unevenly, and the pattern is characteristic. It was adopted first by merchants and rulers, for whom it offered a shared legal framework with trading partners across the desert, and spread more slowly into the countryside, producing a long period in which courts were Muslim while much of the population practised older traditions, and in which rulers negotiated between the two.

Ibn Battuta, who spent time in Mali in the 1350s, is the great eyewitness. He admired the security of the roads, the justice of the sultan and the devotion to Quranic study, and was scandalised by the freedom with which women mixed with men, which tells us a good deal about Malian society and about him.

The religious history here is one of layering rather than replacement. Older West African traditions of ancestor veneration, spirit powers tied to places and natural forces, and ritual specialists whose knowledge was both respected and feared persisted alongside Islam for centuries, and in many places blended with it.

Rulers found Islam useful before they found it necessary. It supplied a legal system compatible with trading partners across the Sahara, a literate administrative class, and a source of prestige legitimated outside the local political order. It also created a persistent tension, because Islamic law disapproved of practices the ruler’s own subjects expected of him.

Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage in 1324 is the clearest statement of the alliance. He crossed the desert to Mecca with a caravan of enormous size, distributed gold in Cairo on a scale that reportedly depressed its value there for years, and returned with scholars and architects. The journey announced Mali to the Islamic world and put it on European maps. The Catalan Atlas of 1375 shows a crowned African king holding a gold nugget.

Songhai under Askia Muhammad pushed further toward orthodoxy, seeking formal recognition from Cairo and appointing jurists to enforce Islamic law. The programme generated its own resistance, and later reformers judged it insufficient.

Sahelian architecture is built from what the region has, sun-dried mud brick rendered in mud plaster, with projecting wooden beams, toron, that stay in place as permanent scaffolding for the annual replastering the buildings require. The result is an architecture that must be maintained communally every year or dissolve, which makes the buildings a social institution as much as a physical one.

The Great Mosque of Djenné is the largest mud-brick structure in the world, and the present building, though early twentieth-century, follows a form established centuries earlier. Its annual replastering is a civic festival involving the whole town.

Djenné-Djenno, the older city nearby, matters for a different reason. Excavation there revealed a settlement founded in the third century BC that had become a substantial town by about 400 AD, before Islam, before the trans-Saharan trade, and without evidence of the centralised elite that older theory assumed cities required. It established that West African urbanism was indigenous and considerably earlier than had been believed.

The sculptural traditions of the region are strong and older than the empires. Nok terracottas from Nigeria date to the first millennium BC, and the Djenné-Djenno terracottas are of high quality. The later bronze casting traditions of Ife and Benin, though outside these empires, belong to the same broad world, and were accomplished enough that European observers at first refused to believe they were African.

Timbuktu is the answer to anyone who imagines West Africa as non-literate. From the fifteenth century it held a scholarly community teaching law, theology, grammar, rhetoric, logic, astronomy and medicine, with the Sankore mosque at its centre and a book trade that was reportedly among the city’s most profitable.

The manuscripts survive in enormous numbers, hundreds of thousands of them, in Arabic and in African languages written in Arabic script, held in family libraries across Mali and neighbouring countries and passed down privately for generations. They include commentaries, legal opinions, correspondence, poetry, astronomical tables and works of local history.

Two indigenous chronicles are the most important internal historical sources for Africa anywhere in the Archives. The Tarikh al-Sudan and the Tarikh al-Fattash were written in Timbuktu in the seventeenth century, and they give accounts of Songhai and its predecessors from inside the society rather than from a visitor’s perspective.

The manuscripts’ recent history belongs here too. When militants occupied northern Mali in 2012, librarians and families in Timbuktu smuggled several hundred thousand manuscripts out of the city in a clandestine operation, moving them south by road and river to Bamako. The tradition of preserving them privately, which had kept them safe from colonial collection, kept them safe again.

The sources divide into three kinds, and each has to be read differently. Arabic geographical and travel writing from outside supplies most of the contemporary description and carries its authors’ assumptions. Al-Bakri described Ghana without visiting it, al-Umari recorded Mansa Musa’s Cairo visit from Egyptian informants, and Ibn Battuta went himself.

Internal written sources begin later. The Timbuktu chronicles of the seventeenth century are indispensable and are writing about the empires retrospectively, with the interests of their own moment. The manuscript libraries contain a great deal more that has not been catalogued, let alone studied.

Oral tradition is the third, and it is a real historical source rather than a substitute for one. Griot recitation preserved genealogy, political charter and narrative across centuries through trained transmission with internal checks, and the discipline of using it, developed largely by African historians from the mid-twentieth century, is one of the significant methodological contributions to the field.

The distortion to be aware of is structural. European scholarship largely encountered West Africa after the Atlantic slave trade had reoriented the region’s economy toward the coast and the trans-Saharan routes had declined, and it read the situation it found as the permanent condition. Timbuktu became a European synonym for the ends of the earth because it had stopped being what it was, a well-connected commercial and scholarly city that Cairo and Fez knew perfectly well how to reach.