The Empire of Mali has an important place in history, representing a great bastion of African wealth and success right before the introduction of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Yet, what we know about the Empire of Mali comes largely from outsiders, with Malian sources playing a very small role besides two documents written hundreds of years later. My primary research goal for this potential PhD dissertation is to remedy this, focusing on what we can learn about the Empire of Mali from local documents. It is unclear the amount which can be learned from local documents, but if the amount allows for a narrowing of scope, my secondary question is whether Mansa Musa I’s early 14th century reign was really as unique as is understood in the popular narratives about him, especially on an economic level. Was the empire (or even just the emperor and his associated institutions) genuinely richer under Musa I than under his successors and predecessors in a way that would warrant the comparatively giant place Musa occupies in the world’s collective understanding of African wealth? Or is Musa’s place in history a kind of historiographical accident? I hope and believe local literature will help shed some light on this.
Historical Background
In the AP World History style narrative, West Africa’s moment of historical achievement is from around the 9th or 10th century to around the 15th century or 16th century. Of course, this sweeping narrative acknowledges that each region goes through a full history, but regions can only get to be the center of world history once or twice in the history of the world. Mesoamerica has its Aztecs and Mayans, South America has its Incas, and North Africa has its Egypt. To the extent that people know anything about pre-modern West Africa, they know Ghana, Mali, and Songhay, during the ‘medieval’ period.
These three empires became rich through their mastery of the gold/salt trade. All three of these empires were located in the Sahel (Arabic for shore), acting as a port city for the ocean-like Sahara. To the south of these empires lay goldfields, a scorching climate, and a lack of salt. To the north of these empires were Saharan salt mines, and to the north of that was the Islamicate world at its historical peak, not just one overwhelming caliphate as is sometimes depicted, but actually many loosely centralized Islamic states, rising and falling over time (Marinids, Zayyanids, Mamluks, etc). Each state often wanted its own currency, and each elite wanted its own symbols of wealth, but there is no gold in North Africa. Merchants took note of the Northern abundance of salt and want for gold and the Southern abundance of gold and want for salt and began trading gold northward and salt southward. Ghana, Mali, and Songhay, situated right on the edge of the Sahara, facilitated this trade and applied tariffs to generate revenue.
The Empire of Mali holds an important role in the conception of historical Africa, as the last great and rich African civilization. Due to the recent economic growth of Asia, Africa is the largest concentration of extreme poverty in the world, and that is set to continue unless African economic growth rates dramatically improve.[1] West Africa is even poorer than many other parts of Africa; continental West Africa contains no country where the mean income exceeds $5,500 a year.[2] Yet, not all that long ago, the Empire of Mali was known far and wide as a rich empire led by an unimaginably rich king, and this represents a point of pride not only for West Africans but for anyone who cares about West Africa. Race plays a role here too—not even 700 years ago, the richest man on the face of the Earth was a black African. That Africa contained so much wealth so recently is the main takeaway in the Western memory of the Empire of Mali.
Mansa Musa (Musa I) gets a special spot within that narrative. According to website[3] after website[4] after website,[5] Musa I was probably the richest person to ever live. It is impossible to know if this is actually true both because there is not enough source material, and because converting from 14th century gold possessions to 21st century US dollars is not possible in any meaningful way. Nonetheless, the title of “richest person ever” is one that sticks out, and one that brings attention to the Empire of Mali, regardless of its veracity.
Historiographical Background
Not all that much is known about the empire of Mali, but what is known basically boils down to four sources. The first of these is the only eyewitness source, Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan traveler who traveled all over Afro-Eurasia and wrote The Rihla (commonly used name; full name in bibliography) as a compilation of his travels. Technically, he is the only primary source on the Empire of Mali, and he is known to embellish; many historians think his book contains descriptions of places he did not even visit (although it is agreed he visited Mali around 1352).
Another key source is Ibn Khaldun, an intellectual based in Tunisia. While he never visited Mali, he is likely to have spoken to many people that did. He wrote Kitāb al-ʻIbar (full name in bibliography), a history of North and West Africa, but also a kind of universal history about the nature of political economy and economics.
The latter two sources on the Empire of Mali are West African chronicles, Tarikh al-fattash (hereon referred to as TF) and Tarikh al-Sudan (hereon referred to as TS), together sometimes referred to as “the Timbuktu Chronicles.” They were both located in Timbuktu when publicized to the non-local world, TSpublicized in the 1850s and TFin 1911. TS was written by Abd al-Rahman al-Sa'di in the mid-17th century. As for TF, it is still hotly debated how many authors wrote it, who exactly they were, and when exactly it was written and possibly rewritten or revised—and there are a number of possible theories.[6] Both chronicles contain important information about Mali not found in Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Battuta’s works, much (but not all) of which is about Musa’s reign. These chronicles were written hundreds of years after Musa’s death, so they likely reflect what the history (probably mostly oral) of the Empire of Mali was at the time when the chronicles were published.
The last key sources are those that describe Musa I’s hajj. These center mostly on Musa’s travels through Egypt. The most notable of these sources is Ibn al-Umari’s Masālik al-abṣār fī mamālik al-amṣār, which contains the famous anecdote that Musa gave away so much gold that he deflated the price of gold in Egypt. However, al-Umari is not the only source here. Ibn Kathir, Badr al-Din al-Halabi, al-Maqrizi, and Ibn al-Dawadari also wrote about it.[7] This is in addition to the discussions of Musa’s hajj to be found in Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Battuta’s work and in the Timbuktu Chronicles.
Lastly, it is worth mentioning that new oral histories are always being collected on Malian history. It has been the case for some time that the oral history as performed by the jeliw (a local word for griot) focuses almost entirely on Sundiata, the first king of Mali.[8] This is unfortunate for this project, and it is my profound hope that more oral history will emerge to us non-locals that focuses on the empire of Mali after Sundiata’s death.
Archives
I will consult the following archives:
Musee National du Mali (National Museum of Mali)
Route de Koulouba BP 159
Bamako, Mali[9]
Direction nationale des bibliothèques et de la documentation (National Library)
Hamdallaye ACI 2000 Avenue Kouamé Kourouma BPE 4473
Bamako, Mali[10]
Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research
Cannot locate an address, but the institute is easy to find on navigation websites such as Google Maps, and the coordinates are as follows: 16°46'36.2"N 3°00'19.4"W[11]
Timbuktu, Mali
Djenne Manuscript Library
B.P 40
Djenne, Mali[12]
Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France)
Quai François Mauriac, 75706
Paris, France
Because the Timbuktu Chronicles have been publicized for over a century, it is documented where the known manuscripts of them are located, and it is a big deal when a new one is located. Three manuscripts of TS are located at the National Library of France, under call numbers Arabe 5147, Arabe 5256, and Arabe 6096.[13] Two more manuscripts of TS are at the Ahmed Baba Institute at call numbers MS 660 and 681; another is located at the Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France (also in Paris) at call number MS 2414 (Fonds De Gironcourt 200); and a final one is located at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Algiers, Algeria at call number Fonds Ben Hamouda, MS 4.[14] The manuscripts of the TF are even more all over the place. What scholars refer to as MS B of TF is located at the National Library of France under the call number Arabe 6651; what they refer to as MS A is at the Ahmed Baba Institute (Shelfmark 3927); other key documents including parts of TF and closely related manuscripts are also located at the Ahmed Baba Institute (Shelfmarks 2, 64, 2221, 2934, 8378, and likely even more above the number 9000—not all of the Ahmed Baba Institute has been catalogued), the Boukhary Library in Banikan, Mali at the call number 549, and a final manuscript at the Institut des Recherches en Sciences Humaines in Niamey, Niger at call number 2569.[15] Because many of the aforementioned libraries only contain one relevant manuscript, I did not include them in the main list, even though they would still warrant a visit were I to eventually complete a PhD dissertation on this topic.
In addition to these more public libraries are a number of private libraries in Timbuktu, often still controlled by the prominent Timbuktu families that were elite centuries ago. A good example of this is the Fondo Ka’ti Library, run by Diadié Haidara, who claims to be descended from Mahmud Ka’ti, arguably one of the writers (or the main writer, or maybe not a writer at all—it’s all heavily disputed) of TF.[16] There are dozens of private libraries in Timbuktu; below is Professor Emeritus Charles C. Stewart’s listing of them in May 2021, although he thinks there are even more out there.[17] The one of these libraries that most comes up in the literature is Mamma Haidara Library.
The third column of the table represents those that have been entered into Stewart’s database.
I do not know all that is contained in these private libraries, and I do not even know what is in many of the archives that were in the main list. The more public libraries at least have some catalogues that exist on WorldCat (where Wendel had advised me to look), but many of them are old and outdated. For example, catalogues of the Ahmed Baba Institute exist before 2013, but it was burned by terrorists that year and rebuilt a few years later, with many of the manuscripts destroyed, and the rest rearranged. That is not to say catalogues will not be useful; I believe the problem of poorly catalogued archives could be ameliorated in three steps:
- Contact the relevant scholars and librarians in this field. I have already done this to mixed success, but I would do much more when embarking on this project. Important living scholars include Michael A. Gomez at NYU, Mauro Nobili and Charles C. Stewart at University of Illinois, Ousmane Kane at Harvard Divinity School, and Paulo de Moraes Farias (retired) among others. There are also African-based scholars working on the manuscript history of the era, like Shamil Jeppie at the University of Cape Town. The French journalist and political scientist Jean-Michel Djian should also be helpful. All of these scholars have close contact with the librarians of the libraries that I have mentioned, who would have an even better grasp on the materials in their collections.
- Time and patience. Getting ahold of these catalogues usually requires loaning them from another library, since they are completely scattered across American universities and mostly not online when they exist at all. One must wait for catalog after catalog to arrive, and then sift through them to understand their relevance and completeness. Recently, I loaned a catalog of the Musee National from Harvard, and it arrived, and it is a picture book of their archaeological collection, not in any way related to their archives.
- Visiting. After gathering as much information as one can from home using catalogues and communications with librarians and scholars, I must actually visit Mali to explore the archives for myself. This is difficult due to the amount of conflict in the region, but it must be done or else such a project is simply incomplete.
The Process
How would I go from hundreds of thousands of scattered manuscripts to genuinely filling gaps in our knowledge of 14th century Mali? As mentioned in the previous section, I would lean on the past scholars and existing literature to get a start. I would also learn Arabic, enough French to travel in Mali, and perhaps even some Mandinka (the main spoken language in the empire) to help read ajami, the Arabic script of local languages used in some manuscripts. Then, I would attempt to tour many of the public and private libraries in Mali. One exciting thing about studying a field lacking many primary sources and located in an essentially failed state is that new discoveries are always happening. I suspect that I could potentially make some of these new discoveries of documents as a PhD student, but even if I could not, amid the hundreds of thousands of already publicized manuscripts, there are many that have not been sufficiently integrated into what is known about the Empire of Mali.
One problem that emerges here is that not very much of the material in these manuscripts is historical. Charles C. Stewart’s estimates that of the Timbuktu manuscripts he’s catalogued in his database (tens of thousands), but 6% of them are historical, while 37% are religious, 29% are legal, and 15% are literature or poetry.[18] This does not mean I will use only 6% of the Timbuktu manuscripts. Religious and legal texts and poetry can be useful too, but one must read along a different grain than that which the archive is beckoning to be read with. In religious texts, many of which are Quran, one easy way to discover something about the place is to compare the religious texts with their analogous ones in different countries. Is a medieval Malian Quran different from a medieval Saudi Quran? If so, there’s information to be gleaned there about what was important in life at a certain time and place. For religious texts that aren’t analogous, the job is made even easier, because the existence of a certain religious text in Mali says something about life there, since religion is never purely abstract. Poetry and legal texts are even easier to incorporate because what people choose to write poetry or laws about (and how they write about them) reflects values and sentiments in a given historical time. Knowing the literature of the Empire of Mali decently well, I suspect these legal or poetic writings are written centuries after Musa’s death, but at worst, they provide cultural information about the area, and at best, the poetic writings might discuss ancestors and tradition and the legal texts might discuss precedent.
Selected Annotated Bibliography
Below is a list of the most important work I am aware of on the Empire of Mali and/or its local sources. It is not exhaustive, nor is it a reflection of all the literature I found.
Selected Secondary Literature
Levtzion, Nehemia. Ancient Ghana and Mali. Suffolk, UK: Richard Clay Ltd, 1973.
This book is the seminal and essentially the original work on medieval West Africa, carefully threading fragments of information from the Arab sources and the Timbuktu chronicles (including manuscripts of them that can no longer be found) into an easy-to-follow narrative about Ancient Ghana and Mali.
Gomez, Michael A. African Dominion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.
African Dominion is the most recent piece of important literature on medieval West Africa. It builds upon the same sort of narrative as Ancient Ghana and Mali, but it also tries to incorporate evidence that Levtzion did not have available to him, like recently published oral histories and archaeological discoveries. The book also discusses the place of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay in the sweeping world history narrative that I introduced earlier in the proposal.
The Timbuktu Chronicles
Disputed author(s). Tarikh al-fattash. Disputed date(s). First edited and translated from the original Arabic to French in 1913. Recently, it was translated into English from Arabic in 2011. Both citations for those versions are below.
Kati, Mahmoud. “Tarikh El-Fettach” Ou Chronique Du Chercheur Pour Servir à l’histoire Des Villes, Des Armées, et Des Principaux Personnages Du Tekrour. Edited by Ernest Leroux. Translated by Octave Victor Houdas and Maurice Delafosse. Paris, 1913.
Timbuktī, Maḥmūd Kutī ibn Mutawakkil Kutī, Christopher Wise, and Hala Abu Taleb. Taʼrīkh Al Fattāsh = The Timbuktu Chronicles, 1493-1599: English Translation of the Original Works in Arabic by Al Hajj Mahmud Kati. Trenton, N.J: Africa World Press, 2011.
Earlier in this proposal, the importance of the original source is discussed. Part of the reason why it is so imperative to learn Arabic and get one’s hands on original manuscripts when possible is that little is agreed upon in the translations, even the original French one (which featured some editing too). De Moraes Farias, a prominent scholar, calls the English translation of TF “a flawed, in places misleading rendering of the chronicle.” Nobili, also mentioned previously, writes “the Tarikh al-fattash, in its current edited version, is a puzzling work, full of inconsistencies, problems of authorship, and textual manipulations which are still not fully understood.”[19] Nobili is a specialist in the TF, and below is a citation of his recent book all about this chronicle.
Nobili, Mauro. Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Aḥmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa. African Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108804295.
Abd al-Rahman al-Sa’di. Tarikh al-Sudan. Circa 1655. First edited and translated in 1900 from original Arabic to French. Translated to English from the original Arabic in 1999. The citations for those versions are below.
Abd al-Rahman al-Sa’di, “Tarikh es-Soudan” par Abderrahman ben Abdallah ben 'Imran ben 'Amir es-Sa'di. Edited by Ernest Leroux. Translated by Octave Victor Houdas. Paris, 1900.
Hunwick, John. Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire. Leiden, Netherlands and Boston, MA and Cologne, Germany: Brill, 1999.
The importance of TS in understanding the Empire of Mali is discussed earlier in this proposal. There are significantly fewer disputes about this chronicle or its translations than there are about TF, and generally speaking, this chronicle gets less attention, despite its usefulness.
Collections of Arabic Sources
Hopkins, J.F.P. and Nehemia Levtzion. Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Often just called the Corpus, this essential text compiles many of the important Arabic sources on medieval West African history and translates them to English. This text contains, for example, the many Hajj descriptions that I mentioned earlier in the proposal (by al-Umari, al-Maqrizi, Ibn Kathir, al-Halabi, and al-Dawadari). The Corpus is a prolifically cited source in newer books like African Dominion because it collected many Arabic sources that lightly mention West Africa and put all of these mentions in one place.
Moraes Farias, Paulo F. de. Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Similar to the Corpus, this more recent compilation contains several relevant Arabic sources on Malian history. Few of the inscriptions featured in this book are from the era of the Empire of Mali, but there are specific inscriptions that are from then or mention the era.
Ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldun
Ibn Battuta, Tuḥfat an-Nuẓẓār fī Gharāʾib al-Amṣār wa ʿAjāʾib al-Asfār [A Masterpiece to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling]. 1355. Several translations exist, but all that I have seen are fragments containing different pieces of the Rihla, as Battuta’s work is known, so citing one of them seems misplaced, especially since I will be engaging with the original one anyway.
Ibn Khaldun, Kitāb al-ʻIbar wa-Dīwān al-Mubtadaʼ wa-l-Khabar fī Taʼrīkh al-ʻArab wa-l-Barbar wa-Man ʻĀṣarahum min Dhawī ash-Shaʼn al-Akbār [Book of Lessons, Record of Beginnings and Events in the History of the Arabs and the Berbers and Their Powerful Contemporaries]. Circa 1377. Again, only partial translations exist.
Earlier in the proposal, the role of Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Battuta’s writing is discussed.
[1] Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Global Extreme Poverty,” Our World in Data, Originally revised as recently as 2019 2013, https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty.
[2] “GDP per Capita,” Our World in Data, accessed August 28, 2021, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank.
[3] Naima Mohamud, “Is Mansa Musa the Richest Man Who Ever Lived?,” BBC News, March 10, 2019, sec. Africa, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47379458.
[4] Jacob Davidson, “The 10 Richest People of All Time,” Money, July 30, 2015, https://money.com/the-10-richest-people-of-all-time-2/.
[5] Jaclyn Anglis, “Meet Mansa Musa, The Richest Person In History,” All That’s Interesting, December 30, 2016, https://allthatsinteresting.com/mansa-musa.
[6] Mauro Nobili and Mohamed Shahid Mathee, “Towards a New Study of the So-Called TF,” History in Africa 42 (2015): 37–73.
[7] Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 105-106.
[8] Ibid, 92.
[9] “Musée National Du Mali,” accessed August 29, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20131127160433if_/http://musee-national-mali.org/spip.php?article30.
[10] “Structures | Africultures : Direction nationale des bibliothèques et de la documentation,” Africultures (blog), accessed August 29, 2021, http://africultures.com/structures/?no=6929&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=499.
[11] “Google Maps,” Google Maps, accessed August 29, 2021, https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ahmed+Baba+Institute/@16.7764204,-3.0053374,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0xe17cebcf6b756d9:0x7780a6e28605852d!8m2!3d16.7764204!4d-3.0053374?hl=en.
[12] “Djenne Manuscript Library,” The Islamic Manuscript Association, accessed August 29, 2021, https://www.islamicmanuscript.org/DirectoryOfMembers/inst.aspx?mid=267.
This address does not seem especially precise. Luckily, the British Library’s Endangered Archives Project site also has a map that places the Djenne Manuscript Library at a location that is easy to navigate towards once in Djenne. “Major Project to Digitise and Preserve the Manuscripts of Djenné, Mali (EAP488),” Endangered Archives Programme, September 6, 2017, https://eap.bl.uk/project/EAP488.
[13] ʿABD AL-RAḤMĀN IBN ʿABD ALLĀH AL-SAʿDĪ Auteur du texte, “Taʾrīḫ Al-Sūdān.ʿABD AL-RAḤMĀN IBN ʿABD ALLĀH AL-SAʿDĪ” (manuscript), accessed August 29, 2021, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9065316d. The URLs for the second and third manuscripts are https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90653380.r=.langFR and https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90657280.r=.langFR .
[14] John Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire [Mostly an English Translation of TS] (Leiden, Netherlands and Boston, MA and Cologne, Germany: Brill, 1999), p. xiv.
[15] Nobili and Mathee, “Towards a New Study of the So-Called TF,” 54.
[16] Susana Molins Lliteras, “The Making of the Fondo Ka’ti Archive: A Family Collection in Timbuktu,” Islamic Africa 6 (2015): 185–91.
[17] Charles C. Stewart, “What’s In the Manuscripts of Timbuktu? A Survey of the Contents of 31 Private Libraries,” History in Africa 0 (May 20, 2021): 1–30, https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2020.18, p. 27-28.
[18] Ibid, 11.
[19] Nobili and Mathee, “Towards a New Study,” 39.