Mali after Musa

The Mali empire had no settled law of succession. The throne could pass from brother to brother or from father to son, and both principles had supporters in the royal Keita lineage. Sundiata, the founder, was succeeded by sons, and then by a freed slave of the royal household, Sakura, who seized power, expanded the empire and was killed on the way back from pilgrimage. Musa himself came from a collateral branch of the family. Every succession was a contest.

Musa’s own accession shows how irregular the process could be. He told an official in Cairo, whose account survives in the encyclopaedia of al-Umari, that his predecessor had wanted to find the far edge of the ocean. The king sent two hundred ships into the Atlantic, and when only one came back he set out himself with two thousand more and never returned, leaving Musa as his deputy in charge. Whatever lies behind the story, it is a king explaining to foreigners why the throne had come to him rather than to someone with a better claim.

Musa’s son Maghan reigned for about four years. Musa’s brother Sulayman followed and ruled from 1341 to about 1360, and it was Sulayman’s court that Ibn Battuta saw. Ibn Battuta found him stingy, which may be a guest’s complaint, but the state he describes is orderly and safe, with travellers able to cross the country without fear of robbers. That orderliness did not survive him.

After Sulayman’s death his son and Maghan’s son fought a civil war. The winner, Mari Jata II, is the king Ibn Khaldun’s informants remembered worst. He emptied the treasury, they said, and among other things sold a celebrated boulder of gold, weighing about twenty kantars, that had been the pride of the royal treasure. He died of sleeping sickness in 1374, a disease carried by the same tsetse fly that killed the empire’s horses. In the following years one king was murdered, real power passed to court officials who ruled through puppets, and a series of short reigns followed. Ibn Khaldun’s account, written in the 1390s, ends in confusion, which is probably an accurate picture of the court.

Mali was never a single administration on the Mauryan or Roman model. At its centre was the Mande heartland on the upper Niger, where the mansa ruled through his own clans, officials and household slaves. Around it was a ring of conquered provinces under governors, called farba in the sources, who lived among the local population and collected tribute. Beyond that were kingdoms that kept their own rulers and paid tribute to the mansa, acknowledging him as overlord as long as he was strong enough to insist.

Ibn Battuta met the system at its northern edge. At Walata, the first town of Mali he reached from the desert, he was received by the farba, who sat on a raised platform and addressed the merchants through an interpreter even though they were standing in front of him. The Moroccan was offended, and recorded the slight in detail. It was the etiquette of a court that expected deference, and it worked only as long as the court behind it could enforce what it expected.

The army was the other half of the system. Mali’s cavalry, built on horses imported across the Sahara at great cost, as described in Cavalry and the limits of the horse, could reach distant provinces and punish rebels. Horses died quickly in the humid south, so the army was strongest in the open savanna and the Sahel, and weakest exactly where the new threats would come from.

Mali’s wealth came from its position between the gold fields of the upper Senegal and Niger and the trans-Saharan routes to North Africa, as described in Gold for salt. The empire did not mine gold itself. It controlled the trade, taxed it, and protected the merchants who carried it. That arrangement depended on the empire’s ability to keep the routes safe and the trading towns obedient.

Those towns were not in the Mande heartland. Timbuktu, Djenne, Walata and Gao lay hundreds of kilometres to the north and east, on the edge of the desert and along the Niger bend. They were inhabited by Soninke, Songhai, Berber and Arab merchants and scholars whose loyalty to a Mande king depended on the protection and stability he could offer. When a weak court in the south could no longer provide them, they looked for other protectors, or ran their own affairs.

The first raiders came early. The Timbuktu chronicles say that the Mossi of what is now Burkina Faso sacked Timbuktu in the 1330s, around the time of Musa’s death, burning the town and driving out Mali’s officials, though the town was recovered. Mossi cavalry would raid the Niger valley repeatedly over the next century and a half, reaching as far as Walata in the 1480s.

From the north came the Tuareg, the camel-herding Berber peoples of the Sahara who controlled the desert approaches to the Niger bend. As Mali’s grip weakened they demanded payments from the towns and then took them over. Around 1433 the Tuareg chief Akil took Timbuktu. Mali’s governor left, and the town’s scholars and merchants dealt with the Tuareg directly. It remained under Tuareg overlordship for some thirty-five years. Walata was lost in the same period.

These losses mattered beyond their size. The northern towns were the termini of the desert routes, the places where North African salt, copper, cloth and horses were exchanged for West African gold. A Mali that had lost them still had gold, but no longer controlled the exchange or the taxes on it.

Gao, the old Songhai capital on the Niger far to the east, had been brought under Mali by Sakura or Musa. At some point in the later fourteenth century a local dynasty, the Sunni, made it independent again. For decades it remained a regional power.

Then in 1464 Sunni Ali came to the throne, and in less than thirty years he turned Gao into the centre of an empire. He took Timbuktu from the Tuareg in 1468, treating its scholars so harshly that the chroniclers of the town remembered him as a tyrant. He took Djenne after a long siege around 1473, and fought the Mossi and the Fulani. His successor, Askia Muhammad, extended the empire further west into what had been Mali’s lands. The story of the state that replaced Mali is told in Provinces, governors and a standing fleet.

While Mali was losing the Niger bend it was gaining a new neighbour on its western coast. Portuguese ships reached the mouth of the Senegal in the 1440s and the Gambia soon after, and began trading for gold, slaves and other goods directly on the coast. The western provinces of the empire, along the Gambia, now had a market that did not depend on the Sahara or on the Niger towns.

Mali’s rulers saw both the threat and the opportunity. Portuguese sources record embassies sent from Portugal to the mansa of Mali in the 1480s and again in 1534, and Malian appeals for Portuguese help against Songhai and the Fulani. The help never came in any useful form. The Jolof confederation in Senegal had already broken away in the fourteenth century, and the coastal trade gave every regional power along the Atlantic its own source of wealth and horses.

The empire did not end in a single defeat. By 1500 it was a regional kingdom in the Mande heartland, still ruled by Keita mansas and still respected as the source of a great tradition. Leo Africanus, writing of the 1510s, describes the kingdom of Melli as rich in grain and cattle and its people as the most civilised of the region, and a vassal of Songhai.

When Songhai itself was destroyed by a Moroccan army at Tondibi in 1591, as described in Tondibi, Mali saw an opening. In 1599 Mansa Mahmud led an army against Djenne, by then held by the Moroccans, and was defeated by Moroccan musketeers. It was the last campaign of the old empire. In the seventeenth century the Mande heartland broke into small chiefdoms, and in the eighteenth the Bamana kingdom of Segou rose on its eastern edge.

Historians weigh the causes differently. Michael Gomez gives most weight to the dynasty’s politics and to how the empire depended on its rulers’ prestige. Others stress the shift in trade, as Atlantic commerce drew gold towards the coast, or the slow pressure of the desert peoples on the Sahel towns. The causes reinforce each other. A court divided against itself could not protect the trading towns, the towns found other masters, and the empire lost the revenue it needed to recover.

Some historians add the climate. George Brooks argued that a long dry phase in the western Sahel, from about 1100 to 1500, pushed the tsetse fly south and let horse-borne states like Ghana and Mali expand, and that a wetter period afterwards helped the forest and coastal powers at the expense of the savanna empires. The chronology is debated and the evidence is patchy. It is at least a reminder that an empire built on cavalry depended on where horses could live. What did not decline was Mali’s memory. The Sundiata epic, recited by the griots, kept the empire at the centre of Mande identity, and when the French colony of Soudan became independent in 1960 it took the name Mali.