Kingdoms of Gold and Salt
1Over about a thousand years, three great kingdoms rose one after another in the grasslands south of the Sahara: Ghana, Mali and Songhai. Each grew rich from trade across the desert. Gold came from mines near the upper Niger and Senegal rivers, to the south. Salt, which people in the hot grasslands needed and could not find nearby, came from mines deep in the Sahara, to the north, such as Taghaza. Traders carrying these goods passed through the kingdoms, and rulers taxed them.
2Ghana was the first. Muslim traders from North Africa crossed the desert to its capital, and its kings grew powerful by controlling the trade. In 1068 al-Bakri, a scholar in Muslim Spain, described Ghana's king and his army. Ghana lost much of its power in the 1100s.
3Mali, founded by Sundiata Keita around 1235, controlled the gold fields and the trading cities along the Niger River. Its ruler Mansa Musa, a Muslim, made the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, in 1324. On the way he stopped in Cairo, where he and his followers spent and gave away large amounts of gold. In the 1350s the traveler Ibn Battuta crossed the desert to Mali and wrote down what goods cost in its towns.
4Timbuktu, near the bend of the Niger River, grew under Mali into a center of trade and Islamic learning. In 1468 the Songhai ruler Sunni Ali took the city, and Songhai grew into an empire that many historians think was the largest of the three. About 1510, a young traveler from Fez, in North Africa, later known as Leo Africanus visited Timbuktu. Decades later his book about Africa was published in Italy for European readers.
5In 1591 an army sent by the ruler of Morocco crossed the Sahara and defeated Songhai's much larger army. The Moroccan soldiers carried guns, and Songhai's army had few. The empire broke apart. Over time, more of the gold trade moved toward ports on the Atlantic coast, where European ships now came to trade.