Kingdoms Built on Trade
1For more than a thousand years, trade routes crossed the Sahara, the world's largest hot desert, linking West Africa with North Africa and the Mediterranean world. Camels made these long crossings possible because they can travel for days without water. Merchants traveled together in caravans, sometimes with hundreds or even thousands of camels, for safety in the desert.
2Two goods drove much of this trade. In the Sahara, at places such as Taghaza, workers cut rock salt into large slabs. Salt was scarce in the grasslands and forests to the south, yet people there needed it to stay healthy in the heat and to keep food from spoiling. Those southern lands had gold, mined near the upper Niger and Senegal rivers. Caravans heading south also carried copper and cloth from North Africa, and caravans heading north carried gold, ivory and enslaved people. Some old stories claim that salt traded for its weight in gold, but historians think that was rare.
3The first great trading kingdom was Ghana. It lay northwest of the present-day country of Ghana, in parts of what are now Mauritania and Mali. Its kings grew rich without owning the gold mines. According to an Arab writer in the 1000s, the king of Ghana taxed each load of salt that came into the kingdom and each load that went out. The king also kept every gold nugget for himself, so traders could deal only in gold dust. Ghana lost much of its power in the 1100s.
4Mali rose in the 1200s. Its founder, Sundiata Keita, won a key battle around 1235 and built a kingdom that controlled the gold fields and the trade cities along the Niger River. Mali's most famous ruler, Mansa Musa, ruled in the early 1300s. He was a Muslim, and in 1324 he made the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Arab writers reported that he crossed the desert with thousands of followers and so much gold that, after he spent and gave it away in Cairo, gold there was worth less for years. Mansa Musa came home with scholars and an architect, and he had a great mosque built in Timbuktu. Over time, Timbuktu became famous for its scholars and its books.
5As Mali weakened, the Songhai people, based in the city of Gao, grew stronger. The Songhai ruler Sunni Ali captured Timbuktu in 1468. A later ruler, Askia Muhammad, made Songhai larger still and supported Islamic learning. In 1591 an army from Morocco, armed with guns, defeated Songhai, and the empire broke apart.