Griots, Chronicles and a Golden Map: Dating Ghana, Mali and Songhai

Piecing Together West Africa's Past

1For about a thousand years, the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali and Songhai grew rich from the trade that carried gold north across the Sahara and salt south. Few written records from inside the early kingdoms survive, so historians piece their story together from several kinds of sources: oral tradition, reports by outside writers, maps, archaeology and chronicles written later in Timbuktu.

2In Mali, griots are keepers of history. Griot families memorize and perform the histories, family lines and songs of their people and pass them from parent to child. Their best-known story, the epic of Sundiata, tells how a prince who could not walk as a child grew up to defeat the Sosso king Sumanguru around 1235 and found the empire of Mali. Griots still perform the epic today. Historians value it because it shows what the Mande people remembered as important, but they treat its details with care, since stories can change over centuries of retelling.

3Some of the earliest written descriptions came from Muslim scholars outside West Africa. In 1068 al-Bakri, a scholar in Muslim Spain, described Ghana's capital as two towns about six miles apart: one where the king lived, and one for Muslim merchants, with twelve mosques. Al-Bakri never traveled to Ghana. He collected reports from merchants who had. At Koumbi Saleh, in what is now Mauritania, a site many historians think was that capital, archaeologists have found the ruins of stone houses and a mosque.

4Mali's wealth became famous far away. Its ruler Mansa Musa, a Muslim, had crossed the Sahara on the hajj to Mecca with a huge caravan and spent and gave away so much gold on the way that writers in Egypt and beyond told of it for years. In 1375 a mapmaker on the Mediterranean island of Majorca drew the Catalan Atlas. In West Africa it shows a crowned ruler, labeled as Musa, seated on a throne and holding up a large piece of gold.

5Under Mali and then Songhai, Timbuktu became a center of Islamic learning as well as trade. Scholars taught at mosques such as Sankore, and books were bought and sold in its markets alongside salt and gold. In the 1650s a Timbuktu scholar, al-Sa'di, wrote a long chronicle, the Tarikh al-Sudan, about the rulers of Songhai and the Moroccan invasion that ended their empire. Families in Timbuktu still keep collections of old manuscripts today.