Medieval Africa: the kingdom of Mali
“While parts of Europe struggled to emerge from the Dark Ages, trade and culture flourished in great cities of West Africa, where artisans crafted sumptuous gold objects and scholars attracted students to centers of learning. The history of medieval Africa, long ignored and distorted, is here given full attention.” Those are the words of Hazel Rochman, written while reviewing the book The Royal Kingdoms of Ghana, Mali and Songhay: Life in Medieval Africa. We too want to give medieval Africa our full attention. UNIC NIGERIA
We have learned from our readers that the ancient Mali Kingdom is a hot topic in many of America’s elementary schools these days, for a wide variety of reasons. Actually, Mali has captured the attention of a wide variety of people, from historians to architects to anthropologists to religious leaders and artists. It offers a rich study in African history, culture and art, and serves as a good jumping off point for many teachers and schools to attract young students to study Africa further.
We thought we would try to be of some value to these teachers and students by touching on the subject here. We say “touch,” because there is an enormous amount of history, culture and art here, and quite a bit of good, credible information available. Our article is long, and we lead you to many, many places, but once you’ve done all that, you’ve still just touched on the subject. Nonetheless, you will learn a great deal, and it will be fun.
Let us warn you in advance — we are going to cover a lot of ground here, and highlight many, many very important areas of study. You might well have to go through this several times to see all the linkages. We will cut across many vertical areas of knowledge.
Always start with the geography
When we start an endeavor such as this, our very first stop is always the book, The Peopling of Africa: a Geographic Interpretation, by James L. Newman. It is easy to read, understand, and is extraordinarily credible. Newman’s book always helps us get organized. (Click the cover here to learn more and order if you wish. This is our bible on early Africa.)
Newman gets us organized to address the Mali kingdom by getting us on the same sheet of geographic music so to speak. Geography is crucial to the story of the Mali kingdom. He does it this way:
“Western Africa begins where the Sahara ends, and because few major topographic features complicate conditions, its environmental zones follow a fairly symmetrical north to south alignment (see his map below). A short, though erratic, rainy season supports the sparse cover of vegetation that defines the steppe like Sahel, which serves as a transition to the largest and most characteristic region in western Africa, the Sudan. Here is classic savanna, where the rainy season lasts from four months in the north to seven months in the south.”
Vegetation patterns in western Africa display a latitudinal symmetry based on rainfall, from Peopling of Africa
You might not realize it, but there is a lot of information in that paragraph that will help us get organized to address the ancient kingdom of Mali.
The operative word in Newman’s description is “Sahel.” The Sahel is located between the Sahara desert and the rain forests. The term “sahel” is Arabic for “shore,” in this case, not the sea-shore, but rather the southern boundary of the Sahara desert, which was likened to a sea.
You also learn from Newman’s description that, environmentally, the Sahel is a mix of a steppe like region with a sparse cover of vegetation and a classic savanna, a sparsely forested plain.
We’d like to show you some modern-day photos of what the land looks like in the Sahara desert, then the steppe region, the savanna region, and then the rainforest. Remember, we are concerned with the Sahel, which consists of the steppe and savanna regions between the desert and the rainforest.
Nearly everyone knows what a desert looks like. But here is a photo of the Sahara Desert:
The Sahara Desert, from the spectacular collection of Dan Heller
Tropical steppe of Ethiopia, photo credit: M. Marzot
Typical savanna scene in Africa
Rainforest canopy in Africa
You can now imagine yourself living in the Sahel, the environment experienced by those living in the Mali kingdom, between the Sahara desert and rainforest.
We would like to show you another map presentation which is about the same as the one employed by Newman. This was provided by the University of Texas. It is useful because it is in color and shows modern-day national boundaries. It also shows southern Europe and the Mediterranean Sea, to help you get your bearings even a little better. If you compare the two maps, you can see where Newman has combined some areas shown in the Texas map into one area.
To fast-forward to modern times, and help you get your bearings even more, there is an organization of Sahelian countries. It includes the following: Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Chad, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal. These countries are shown on this map.
The Organization of Sahelian Countries
So, you should now have your general geographic bearings about the location of the Sahel. You will learn that the Mali kingdom was in the Sahel, as were some other great kingdoms that preceded and followed it.
By way of a brief summary, regionally we are in West Africa. Environmentally we are in a region right below the Sahara desert, a steppe like region with a sparse cover of vegetation, a classic savanna. Politically, this region now includes a group of countries, one of which is Mali. But, as you will see, the modern political bo0undaries shown above are not at all like what the boundaries were in medieval Africa. Downstream, we will emphasize that as a very important point.
Now that you have your general geographic bearings, we want to get more specific about the region in which the Mali kingdom resided. To do this, we will have to complicate your life just a little.
The Sudanic Belt is key, but be careful you understand what it is
As you do your research on the medieval kingdoms of Africa, you are going to find many references to “Sudan.” In looking back at the map just above, the modern-day country of Sudan is just to the right of and adjacent to Chad. As you can see, today Sudan is not considered a Sahelian country.
But when you saw the reference in Newman’s earlier description, you read him saying:
“The largest and most characteristic region in western Africa, the Sudan.”
What was meant by The Sudan then and what is meant by it today are two different things. In medieval days, the “Sudanic belt” was geographically seen by the experts as one between the Sahara and the Bay of Niger (southern Nigeria) on the north and south, and the Atlantic and Indian oceans on the east and west. In other words, the Sudanic Belt roughly comprised the entire region across the breadth of the continent between the Sahara desert and the rainforests. The Sahel, in turn, seems to have been used to describe the western portion of that broad Sudanic band.
We have found a wonderful map in the Life World Library for Tropical Africa that helps explain a lot of things. That book was done by Robert Coughlan and The Editors of LIFE, copyrighted in 1962. We grabbed this map from the book because it shows what was meant by The Sudan back in medieval days. It also introduces you to a whole host of things that will lead us into a better understanding of the Mali kingdom. We underline here that understanding the Sudanic belt helps us understand the Mali kingdom, the latter of which was located in the western portion of that belt, in the Sahel.
This is what the Robert Coughlan said about this map:
“THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES in Africa over many centuries are outlined above. Migrations would often result in one group intermingling with another or bringing the other under its control. Trade across the Sahara would be carried by camel as far south as the commercial centers of the Sudan, then on foot toward the coastal areas.”
We’d like you to focus just on the top half of the continent, from the area marked “The Sudan” to the northern coast with the Mediterranean Sea. You can see the migrations of people southward with the dark and light brown arrows across the Sahara into the Sudan. You can see the Sudan stretching east and west across the breadth of the continent. The black dotted lines show the main trade routes, and you can see the major trade centers. The circular lines show the major commercial centers of the Sudan. We have drawn a red box around a group of cities that were the main commercial centers of the Mali kingdom, so you get you first glimpse at where that kingdom was.
In this next map, we have blown up that section inside the red box so we can draw your attention to the towns of Timbuktu, Goa, Djenne, Mali, Ghana and Walata. These formed the main commercial centers of the Mali kingdom, and several of them remain important commercial centers to this day.
Up until now we have described the Sudanic belt mainly in geographic terms. But, as far as we can tell, it is a linguistic descriptor as much or more than it is a geographic one. That is, this is a belt where the dominant languages are Nilo-Saharan.
Language is a very important descriptor to group people and, frankly, needs far greater understanding among those of us who are not from Africa. We tend to break people down into ethnic and/or racial groups, and in many instances the groups we cite as ethnic or racial ones are not ethnic groups at all. Today, for example, when discussing Rwanda and the Great Lakes Region, you often hear “Tutsi” and “Hutu” as ethnic groups. They are not ethnic groups. The Belgians fabricated the notion that thet were ethnic groups during the colonial period, and there has been hell to pay for it as a result.
As you can see from the larger map above, Bantu people migrated to the Great Lakes Region. Bantu is a language grouping. We are not experts at all this, but our gut sense is we are far safer to group people according to their linguistic usage and heritage than worrying so much about ethnicity and racial lines.
In any event, the Nilo-Saharan language stock has six branches: Songhai (spoken in Mali), Saharan (including languages spoken both near Lake Chad and in central Sahara), Maban (a group of tongues found east of Lake Chad), Furian (an important language of Sudan), Coman (a group of languages of Ethiopia and Sudan), and Chari-Nile, the principal branch of Nilo-Saharan, composed of the Eastern Sudanic languages, the Central Sudanic languages, and two additional tongues.
So much of what we researched for this story talks to the “Sudanic states” that we wanted you to understand that we are talking about a group of states across this belt just south of the Saharan desert that share a linguistic origin. Obviously, if you share a linguistic origin, you share a great deal of other things and if you were to study this area in greater depth, you would see that.
As a brief point of summary, modern-day Mali, and the former kingdom of Mali, are and were Sudanic states and the main language, Songhai, is a Sudanic or Nilo-Saharan language.
Why the migrations of people southward?
The fact that the Sahel is located right on the “border” of the Saharan desert is a critical point in understanding the economics of the region and the origin of not only the Mali Kingdom, but many others that flourished in this area. Why? Newman puts it this way, and keep in mind the migration map:
“Four thousand years ago population change across this vast area picked up momentum in response to the slow but unrelenting spread of agriculture. Playing a crucial role in events were Saharan nomads, who drifted southward seeking escape from ever worsening desertification.”
We’d like to focus your attention on the word “desertification.” Do not confuse it with “decertification.” Basically, desertification means degradation of formerly productive land. Said differently, it means the desert, in this case, the Saharan desert, is advancing, in this case southward. This is a very vivid photograph of a very complex process. Here, in this photograph by George Gerster, you see linear dunes of the Sahara Desert encroaching on Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania. It’s like an advancing glacier of sand. As an aside, the Swiss born Gerster has become an expert at photographing the geometric designs presented by the land and things people do on the land. He is an expert at aerial photography, and Africa provides him many terrific chances to produce some fabulous images.
We cannot study the desertification process here, but we commend it to your research. It is very, very important. To underscore that, northern Africa once looked much like southern Europe looks today. Interestingly, conservationists and environmentalists have begun projects in the Sahara that have returned some green tint to sections of the Sahara. Perhaps the desertification process can be held in check, or reversed, some day.
Carvanes Du Sel Tenere Sahara , by Durou, Jean-Marc
Click on photo to see at allposters.com
The desertification process was important four thousand years ago, because nomads were trying to escape the Sahara desert by moving southward to find productive land on which to farm. It turns out that moving across the desert to the vast plain-like savannas of the Sahel posed very few restrictions to mobility. Obviously it was very hot and windy, and finding water could get tough, but there were no grand obstacles such as insurmountable mountain ranges or massive bodies of water to cross.
People migrations and the establishment of strategic trade
It is worth mentioning here that the Sahel did not experience mass migrations of people, but instead people moved in small numbers, but the movements were continuous. One of the most significant outgrowths of this movement of people was the establishment of trade and trade routes. It is important here to understand that we are not talking about a few people sitting around trading baseball cards. We are talking about strategic trade that, in the main, connected multiple locations throughout the vast Sahel, northward across the great Sahara Desert to the Mediterranean coastline and Europe.
Trans-Saharan trade routes in wide use between the seventh and eighteenth centuries. Map provided by University of Virginia’s Digital Media Exploring Cultural Landscapes
This map, provided by the University of Virginia, looks very much like the previous map we introduced you to from Time LIFE. What’s nice about this map is it isolates the trade routes, the main trading cities, and two very important rivers, the Senegal and Niger rivers.
Xavier University of Louisiana gives you some dimension to the importance of the strategic trade in this area:
“Most historians of Africa agree that the economy of buying and selling was the driving force in the development of the Sudanic states from as early as 500 AD onward. Trade led to the rise of the cities of the Sahel, greatly centralized power for kings and governments, and gave traders a pivotal role to play in the exercise of influence and power in these Sudanic states. In short, trade actively shaped the political development.”
Xavier asks the key question, “But why?”, and answers it this way:
“But why? Why, that is, was trade so important for African history? Perhaps issues of landscape and environment can provide a starting point for us in our attempt to answer this question. In Africa, regional variations of the most extreme kind–from desert to grassland to forest–meant both that natural resources varied widely according to region, and that interregional demand for commodities not locally available would be high. Hence, despite the importance of agriculture in the savanna zones, commercial wealth would take priority over agrarian wealth … Agriculture in Africa was only one player on the wider stage of the drama of trade in goods and resources. Between Sudanic regions, mutual needs for commodities such as salt and metals were happily matched by a corresponding rich diversity of natural resources in different regions. The salt of the desert, the copper of the savanna, and the gold of the forests did not eliminate trade in agricultural and pastoral goods, but they certainly overshadowed it, at least in the historical record. In the Sudan, the merchant was not seen as a menace to the traditional hierarchies of governmental authority; rather, he was the key to their remarkable growth and prosperity. Trade in Africa did not threaten power structures. It sustained them.”
The matter of trade and trade routes in this region is absolutely fascinating, a marvelous study of its own. Murray Last, writing “The Early Kingdoms of the Nigerian Savanna,” in History of West Africa, suggests a model in which trade routes criss-crossed five “horizontal” zones from west to east. These zones include the coastal zone along the Mediterranean, which was the immediate connector to Europe; the oases of the Sahara; the Sahara desert; the Sudanic Sahel; and the sub-Sahara savanna. Xavier University then says that Last argues that two “vertical” trading networks, one from northwest Africa to the Niger River and the other from Egypt to central Sudan, “came to vie for control over the lucrative trans-Saharan routes.”
What is important to understand is that this all led to intense competition and ultimately the rise and fall of kingdoms. But we also want to point out here that today we think of Africa as a “commodity center” of mostly agricultural commodities. We seldom think of Africa as an area of trade and commercial wealth. Well, during medieval times, “commercial wealth would take priority over agrarian wealth,” and “trade actively shaped (Africa’s) political development.” What happened to change this calculus? We’ll talk to that later, but it was the European invasion.
The growth of kingdoms
In looking back at African history, let’s say roughly from 2000 BC to about 1,000 AD, there were two major stimuli for the growth of population centers that could form the basis of the later growth of kingdoms.
The first was the movement of people from the expanding Sahara southward to the Sahel where they could find productive land for agriculture. Remember these migrations were not mass migrations, so it took time for the population centers to build and coalesce.
The second was the establishment of trade routes throughout the Sahara, Sahel and Savanna. Newman underlines that these trade routes created “widening external contacts.” What you saw was the growth of villages during the last millennium BC of from 500 to 1,000 people for security and farming, and then through the end of that millennium and into the first millennium AD, the establishment of villages that might have begun with farming but soon found themselves at trading crossroads that enabled them to specialize in interregional, strategic trade.
Inland delt of the Niger River in Mali, satellite image
For example, Dhar Tichitt is mentioned by Newman as a farming community that soon gave way in importance to Jenne-jeno (Djenne). Dhar Tichitt was in an expansion phase during the period 900-800 BC, and the Jenno-jeno village, which is in present-day Mali, was first settled in about 250 BC. Its strategic location within the inland Niger delta, pictured above, enabled Jenne-jeno to evolve into an important interregional trading center.
Richard Hooker, writing “Civilizations in Africa” posted in an internet presentation of the Washington State University, introduces us to two great Sahelian kingdoms that arose out of this trade and the enormous social interaction that resulted from it. He writes:
“The first great Sahelian kingdom was Ghana, but the Islamic revolution of the Almoravids, a Berber people living north of Ghana, splintered that kingdom. The Almoravids did not succeed in building their own, Islamic kingdom in the region. The Almoravid revolution, however, led to energetic Islamic proselytizing all throughout the Sahel. Many of the ruling families converted to Islam. One of these ruling families, the Keita, forged a successor to the Ghanaian kingdom, the kingdom of Mali. Mali was built of the monopolization of the trade routes from western and southern Africa to eastern and northern Africa. The most lucrative of these monopolies was the gold trade.”
There was a third great kingdom as well that followed the Mali kingdom, known as the Songhai kingdom. We will not go into the Ghanaian or Songhai kingdoms here because our intent is to concentrate on the Mali kingdom.
In the case of the Ghana kingdom, we are well aware that many Americans are very interested in Ghana because many find their roots there, dating back to the slave trade between this area of West Africa and the US. We’ll try to study the Ghanaian kingdom, and the Songhai kingdom, in later presentations. We want to point out right away, however, where these three kingdoms were located in relationship to each other during the period of medieval Africa.
Sudanic kingdoms such as Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and Karem-Borno owed their power and wealth to controlling the southern part of the trans-Saharan trade. Map credit: Addison Wesley Longman, A division of Pearson Education
If you look at our previous map that locates the modern states that are now in this region, and compare that to this map above of the Sudanic kingdoms, you will quickly see that the Ghana kingdom of medieval Africa was not at all located where modern-day Ghana is. This will be part of an important point to be made later, a very important point about “what might have been” with regard to political boundaries had the European invasion not occurred.
All this said, keep this last map in mind as we will refer to it later.
Mali, during its early evolution beginning in the 11th century and extending to the 14th century, was able to exploit its fertile soil and make it agriculturally very productive. It was also able to take advantage of its key location along the routes to the goldfields. As a result, it was able to expand and ultimately encompassed a massive area from the Lower Senegal and Upper Niger rivers eastward to the Niger bend and northward into the Sahel. It was this size that gave it the edge over Ghana, because its size enabled it to diversify. Not only did farming maintain and build upon its importance, but some communities specialized in herding and fishing, trade flourished in its towns, crafts people of all varieties built their trades, many became teachers and holy men, and others explored for commercial purposes throughout much of West Africa.
Newman writes:
“The rise of Mali changed the center of political, economic and population activity in the western Sudan. Walata and then Timbuktu were successively the principal trans-Saharan trade termini, while Niani (which is where the single kingship first set up shop) prospered as an administrative center.”
Prior to the growth of Mali, the important trade routes connected the Sahel and the Sudan with Morocco. But with Mali, the route to Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt became dominant. The area near the bend in the Niger River prospered, and Djenne grew from an agricultural and trading center to become a center of Islamic learning.
Hooker opines that “Mali was not a true empire, but rather the center of a sphere of influence.” He says that “the territory controlled by Mali comprised three distinct regions: the Senegal region, the central Mande states, and the region of Gao.”
Hooker says the Sungjata (also known as Sundiata), a royal slave and magician in the Ghanaian empire, was the historical founder of Mali. We have seen him referred to as the “Lion King.” He ruled from 1230-1255. But the most significant of the Mali kings was Mansa Musa, who ruled from 1312-1337. Hooker says he “expanded Mali influence over the larger city-states of Timbuktu, Gao and Djenne.” He was a devout Muslim and built magnificent mosques throughout the Mali sphere of influence, and became widely known in the Mideast and in Europe.
Hooker then writes this about Mali:
“It was under Mansa Musa that Timbuktu became one of the major cultural centers not only of Africa but of the entire world. Under Mansa Musa’s patronage, vast libraries were built and madrasas (Islamic universities) were endowed; Timbuktu became a meeting-place of the finest poets, scholars, and artists of Africa and the Middle East. Even after the power of Mali declined, Timbuktu remained the major Islamic center of sub-Saharan Africa.”
“REMOTE TIMBUKTU, which flourished 600 years ago, was sketched in 1828 by René Caillié, a Frenchman who was the first European to visit the city and report on it.” From LIFE World Library, Tropical Africa,” by Robert Coughlan and The Editors of LIFE.
It always seems to be the case that what goes up eventually comes down, and so it was for Mali. As is so often the case when things are going well, greed and the lust for power take control and internal factionalism develops. That’s what happened in Mali and in the latter half of the 14th century, it began its decline. It was attacked by others, key cities were seized, some provinces broke away forming a series of smaller states, and one very important group, the Songhai, asserted their independence. Newman says that would “set the stage for what would become the largest and most powerful of the Sudanic empires,” the Songhai Empire. Newman writes, sadly:
“Mali soon disappeared from the western African scene.”
What is interesting to observe, however, if you start overlaying old and new maps, is that modern-day Mali includes parts of all three former kingdoms.. We tried our hand at doing an overlay. What we produced is not exact, but it is close enough to highlight the point.
Indeed, the Mali kingdom had once been ruled by the Ghana kingdom and Songhai had been an important trade center within the Mali kingdom.
It is also interesting to note that there was a political evolution with each kingdom, each one extending its holdings and each one organizing its government farther than the previous. By the time the Songhai empire came on the scene, it was the largest and most powerful kingdom in medieval West Africa. As an aside, many of us know quite a bit about Medieval Europe, but almost none of us knows that a Medieval West Africa even existed.
One author comments:
“While Mali is a poor country today, it has an extremely rich heritage. For centuries it was the crossroads of great caravans during the ancient kingdoms of Ghana, Mali and Songhai…The memory of ancient Mali is alive today in the tales of the griots, the professional historians, praise singers and musical enterainers…Descendents of the Empire of Mali are spread throughout Mali, Guinea, Gambia, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Guinea-Bissau.”
Another writes: “Mali is the cultural heir to many ancient African empires that occupied the West African Savanna.”
The European invasion and the termination of Africa’s African evolution
There is a very important point to be made here. What we have summarized thus far is an African evolution, African migrations, African geography, African kingdoms, African boundaries. Then we overlaid a modern-day boundary marker for the modern state of Mali. Between the three kingdom evolution and the modern state of Mali, there was a European colonial period that changed everything that was African and tried to make it European. We want to highlight what happened during that period for this region.
To do that, we need to introduce you to the French in West Africa. The French made their initial foray into West Africa as early as 1659 at St. Louis, which is in present-day Senegal. But the French did not get serious about Africa until later in the 19th century, when they began their colonial project. The French view was to make West Africa part of France, a group of overseas provinces. The French started their push into the savanna region from their base in Senegal. They met resistance, and some have referred to the French thrust as an invasion, which we think is an accurate description. By 1890, the French had signed treaties with several African leaders and the French saw these as a mandate to annex large tracts of what was then known as Western Sudan. French military forces with their military advantages conquered West Africa fort by fort. By 1898 the French conquest was virtually complete and by the early 20th century, the French held most of what would come to be their colonial territory in West Africa. This included modern-day Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), and Niger.
Here are two successive maps from that era, one showing Africa during the period 1898-1904, the second as of 1922.
“Carte Generale de l’Afrique: Voir, a leur orde alphabetique, les cartes detaillees des divers pays” (from 1898) in Nouveau Larousse illustré; dictionnaire universel encyclopédique, publié sous la direction de Claude Augé. Paris, Librairie Larousse. 1898-1904, presented by Michigan State University Libraries
“Africa - Political” in The comparative atlas of physical and political geography, founded by the late J.G.Bartholomew. London, Meiklejohn & Son.1922, presented by Michigan State University Libraries
You will want to go to the originals of these maps on the internet, which you can view in a much larger size, but French West Africa is quite visible in both maps, “Afrique Occidental Francaise ” in pink in the first map, “French West Africa” in a kind of light purple on the second map. In the first map, you can see what had happened to “Sudan,” or the Sudanic Belt. The Sudanic Belt, which stretched from ocean to ocean, was now cut in sections and “The Sudan” was now part of Egypt, divorced from the western Sudanic Belt.
Here is yet another map, perhaps easier to read:
Africa, imperial boundaries, 1914, presented by Frank E. Smith’s World of History
The major point to be made here is that the African evolution had been stopped by the 20th century by the European invasion, and the Europeans divided the continent among themselves. On this last map, we recommend you go see the original, because the legend in the lower half is hard to read here. But it reads, French, Spanish, Italian, British, German, Belgian, Portuguese and Independent. It is very hard to figure out which ares were independent. Just about all Africa was in European hands.
What happened to the Sudan of the west? Well, French Sudan was created and became part of what was called the Federation of French West Africa. This federation was created in 1895 to consolidate French holdings in West Africa and was definitively constituted in 1904. French Sudan shows up on this map below as “Fr. Soudan,” and if you look closely, you can see its boundary. By this time, 1930, eastern Sudan has evolved into Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and is close to its modern form.
Africa in the Early Twentieth Century, by Matthew White
A nationalist movement emerged between the two world wars called the Sudanese Union, led by Modibo Keita, shown here, a descendent of the Mali kingdom’s emperors. He became active in nationalist politics in 1946 and represented French Sudan in the French Assembly from 1956 to 1958. In 1958 the constituent territories of French West Africa became autonomous republics in the French Community, except for Guinea, which became independent. The Federation of French West Africa was dissolved in 1959.
French Sudan voted to join the French Community as the autonomous Sudanese Republic. In 1959, it joined with Senegal to form the Mali Federation, which broke apart one year later in 1960. That same year, the Sudanese Republic, renamed the Republic of Mali, obtained full independence from France and severed ties with the French Community. Modern Mali is shown in green on this map. Modibo Keita became Mali’s first president. He was ultimately overthrown in a coup in 1968.
What we would like to highlight from all this is to ask you to wonder what might have happened had the Europeans stayed out of Africa and Africa’s African evolution been allowed to proceed on its own. A lot changed in Africa during the colonial period and after. There were many, many wild gyrations caused by the European invasion of Africa. The net impact is that the lines that were finally drawn are in most respects artificial, they are European lines, they do not adequately recognize Africa’s real history prior to the European invasion, and worst of all, the European invasion stopped Africa’s African evolution and implanted a European evolution. That remains the source of many of the continent’s social and political problems to this day.
Perhaps the most notable downside to the way the Europeans made a mess of the continent is that a great many Africans lost their cultural and historical heritage, which in many respects was wondrous, sophisticated and very advanced. Even worse, much of the world doesn’t know a thing about that heritage and has a completely incorrect view of Africa’s place in world history, its legacy, and its capacity to write its own history for the future.
A way to “conclude”
The subject matter touched on here is truly fascinating. One could spend a life time exploring it in great depth. We are going to do something different for this story, and close by highlighting a few more places for you to visit.
First, we have gone to the web sites cited in our “Points of interest to explore” section, and to National Geographic magazine, and grabbed off pictures we thought would interest you about the Mali kingdom. We can assure you there are many more where these came from and we urge you to visit all those web sites, and others. We have assembled the selected images in a photo gallery for you to browse through, we have set up links to the sites from which they came, all as a way to give you an even better sense of the kingdom’s sophistication and glamour. Our little photo gallery is entitled, “The Mali kingdom, its legacy,” October 6, 2002.
Second, we ran across an organization known as Learner.org. This organization has an article entitled, “Collapse: Why do civilizations fall?,” which asks a good question: “How do we know what happened (in Medieval Africa)?” And, of course, the organization answers its own question, this way:
“Like most of what we know about history, the evidence has come from a variety of sources. Arab traders and scholars of the time wrote accounts of these great empires and their important cities, such as Timbuktu. African griots (storytellers) pass on legends of great kings and their battles. Archaeologists are finding evidence at sites such as Timbuktu and Jenne-jeno, another ancient city, that helps to explain how people lived and provide information about dates. All of these methods are helping scholars to understand how these once great African kingdoms rose to power — and why they collapsed.”
As we studied this answer, we realized that in one form or another, we have published articles that address several of those sources of Africa’s history. Several articles are still posted, and a couple have been re-published:
* In February 2000, we published a short article entitled “Rare Timbuktu Islamic manuscripts find prompts establishment of new center at Northwestern University.” We said this by way of introduction:
“Northwestern University of Evanston, Illinois, has recently opened an Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa which it believes will be a world center for the study of Islamic thought in Africa. The institute is funded by a $1 million grant from the Ford Foundation, and will include the cataloging of 3,000 Arabic manuscripts discovered by History and Religion Professor John Hunwick during a 1999 research trip to Timbuktu, Mali.”
* We published an article on the griots in November 2001, entitled, “I am a griot, master in the art of eloquence…vessel of speech…respository of secrets”. We commend it to you. The griots of West Africa are, among other things, story-tellers, historians, genealogists, chroniclers, diplomats, arbitrators, the local collective memory, and even the ancestors of the American blues. Learning about the griots introduces you to a whole new kind of musical and historical legacy, especially between “the traditional West African Griot and the traditional deep-South (USA) bluesman,” both of whom “resonate harmoniously with one another.” Believe it or not, you will see that the griot musical tradition can be found in the works of George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein as well. But the Griots of West Africa are far more than musicians, they have left their mark on all of Islamic West Africa as well as on the Americas, a fascinating people to study.
* We also did a story about the Niger River which talks quite a bit about Mali, has some photos, and leads you to some interesting web sites and sources for more. The story, “The Niger River, Africa’s third largest, the ‘Great River,’ and its delta, the world’s largest,” is in our geography section. We introduced the article this way:
“This river is magnificent, passing almost like a horseshoe through four countries, with tributaries feeding it from many more, all forming the great Niger River Basin. There are incredible cultures and unbelievable scenery through regions most Americans never think about. The architecture is a bit reminiscent of the American Southwest. Much of the region is Islamic. This mighty river carries the people latching on to it back and forth, to and from, and enables agricultural productivity and commerce, but not at the pace it once did during the Malian Empire several hundred years ago. This will be the first of what is certain to be a series of explorations along this most fascinating river.”
* In April 2001, we did a story entitled, “The architecture of Mali’s Niger River valley.” We introduced it this way:
“When laymen look at fabulous architecture, they might find it hard to explain why it is so fabulous, but that it is, even to the layman, is what makes it so. During our brief introduction to this architecture, we heard it variously described as prized, World Heritage, Extreme Articulation: Isotropic Space, complex simplicity, and a new one for us, a ‘key concept of African gemillity paradigm,’ which has us up in the ether trying to define. When we visited the web site of the author of that description, we found a desire to ‘redefine the concept of African Aesthetics in terms of Aesthetics in short, and to trace the paradigms and syntagms of productions labelled as African. By doing so, we outline the fundamentals of the true art history and architecture and bring new insights to art theory too.’ This is a mighty powerful thought.”
* In July 2001, we did a story entitled, “The Great Salt road of the Sahara, an unmarked path from which great West African civilizations emerge,” and introduced it this way:
“Salt mines in the Sahara produced salt that was so valuable it was used for money. The modern word ‘salary’ is derived from it. The Latin word salarium means ‘salt money.’ Salt was one of the earliest goods traded over long distances in Africa and at one time was considered a vital mineral. Salt was used as an item to trade, an item to barter for other products that African traders would move to other locations, where they would again trade for yet other items from Europe. Great West African civilizations grew out of the coincidence of geography, Islamic religion, and this trade in salt and gold. That’s something worthwhile thinking about the next time you reach for that salt shaker”
We hope some of you decide to make a life’s work out of understanding all this and more. It is truly fascinating and exhilarating.