Mali and its ancient Saharan city, Timbuktu, are the grist of legend. In the European imagination “Timbuktu” was the very symbol of a savage and inaccessible place. Mythologised by 18th century Orientalist writers, usually quoting secondary sources, Timbuktu became Africa’s prime victim of prejudice. In reality, Timbuktu was a well-known destination, and the Sahara a continental highway.
Situated at the northernmost tip of the 4, 000 km long Niger River, Timbuktu was for hundreds of years one of the world’s most intellectually advanced cities. For in the 12th century, when Europeans were struggling to write their names, Timbuktu’s scholars were studying Mathematics, Astronomy, Philosophy, Chemistry, Medicine and the Islamic Sciences.
And in the early 14th century, West African navigators were already exploring the Mississippi River – their arrival on American shores across the “darkness and fog” of the Atlantic Ocean preceding the great Muslim Chinese Admiral, Xheng-He, by a hundred years. Xheng-He himself arrived in the Americas long before Christopher Columbus.
West Africa’s biggest nation-state
Today Mali is West Africa’s biggest nation-state. It straddles the Sahel, a sub-Saharan region stretching 4, 800 kilometres from Senegal to Somalia. Sahel, which means “shore”, is the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. It is the world’s biggest desert, and growing.
Global warming, resulting in erratic rainfall and severe sandstorms, is causing the more temperate savannah belt south of the Sahel to disappear – scientists report that even the coral reefs of the West Indies are being clogged up with Saharan sand blown up in the intercontinental jet streams.
Over 10,000 years ago the Sahara was well-watered and was resplendent with lush forests, rich grasses and herds of wild animals. In those days the Niger River flowed northeast from the rocky highlands of Guinea into a large inland lake. Another river, fed by the lake, flowed southwards towards the Atlantic and the coastal delta in Nigeria.
As the Sahara began to dry up from about 4,000 BC, and the lake started to evaporate, these rivers joined up to form what is the unique “boomerang” course of the Niger. It is at the tip of this curve extending north into the Sahara desert – called the “Niger bend” – that Timbuktu was built. This made the city a strategic focal point for traders and empire builders alike.
Niger River a causeway
Whilst the Sahara was no obstacle to those who traversed it in caravans from the Horn of Africa and beyond, the Niger River was an important causeway for West African commerce and culture. Archaeologists are only now beginning to discover evidence of high-density urban centres that existed along the Niger’s banks thousands of years ago.
African history cites the existence of three major West African empires: Ghana, Mali and Songhay. Modern Ghana, which is due south of today’s Mali, was already enjoying trade links with Middle-Eastern and European centres at the time of Christ.
With its independent city-states united under one ruler by CE 300, the Ghanaian kings would control the trans-Saharan trade routes for 700 years. These caravans would take 40 days to reach West Africa from Arabia. The chief trading commodities were salt and gold, and they were as precious in their era as gas and oil would be today.
Salt and gold
Salt was extracted from the Sahara in the north and the gold was mined at secret locations in Ghana to the south. Salt was utilised for the preservation and spicing of food and was so valuable it was used as financial currency. Up until Roman times, soldiers and government servants were often paid in salt – hence the term “salary”.
Ghana had contact with Islam as early as the 7th century when Muslim merchants made their way across the desert. Islamic historians record that Islam spread in Africa through cultural exchange and commerce. They write that Islamic influence was so dominant in Ghana that by the 8th century Arabic had become the written language of the local Soninke people.
By the 11th century the long-standing Ghanaian kingdom had begun to disintegrate into smaller groupings as the Almoravids (or Murabitun), the Berber tribes inspired by ‘Abdullah ibn Yasin, a religious teacher and zealous Maliki, established their kingdom from North-West Africa into Spain.
The Mandinka
The Mande people, later known as the Mandinka, broke away from Ghana and it is through them that the ancient Mali Empire rose to prominence. One of their rulers was Sundiata, the legendary “Lion King”, whose rule saw him introducing cotton to Africa. He consolidated the gold-salt trade and established the Mali kingdom, one that extended during his reign across the Sahel for 2,000 kilometres.
From 1200 to 1500 ancient Mali rose to be one of the world’s major economic and cultural powers. At its zenith in the 14th century, Mali’s territories were only smaller than those of Genghis Khan.
The most famous Mali ruler is Mansa Musa, who came to the throne after his uncle, Abu Bakr, did not return from a journey to the America’s. Accompanied by an army and over 100 ships, Abu Bakr sailed over the horizon never to return. Evidence of Abu Bakr’s expedition is that Mandinka customs have been discovered in Brazil.
It was under Mansa Musa that Mali’s cultural life flourished. In cities such as Timbuktu and Jenne universities were established. So renowned were these madrasahs that an Arabian scholar, Abdur-Rahman at-Tamimi, discovered he was not qualified to sit in the company of Timbuktu’s Shaikhs.
Mansa Musa’s famous Hajj
Mansa Musa ruled from 1307 to 1337 and came to the notice of non-African chroniclers when he performed his famous Hajj of 1324. Travelling with a staggering 180 tons of gold (worth billions of rand today), thousands of slaves and hundreds of camels, he depressed the price of gold in Egypt and transformed the economy of the towns he passed through.
On his return from Hajj he brought scholars, libraries and architects back to Mali. At the peak of Mansa’s rule, Timbuktu’s trade in books was third only to the city’s business in gold and salt. In 1353 the famous traveller, Ibn Battutta (himself an African), passed through the region and wrote about it in his “Rihla”.
After Mansa Musa’s death, his heirs struggled to keep his vast kingdom united. It began to fragment until a Songhay strongman, Sunni Ali Ber, conquered Timbuktu in 1464. He hailed from Sokoto in present-day Nigeria. He is cited in the local “tarikhs”, or historical accounts, as the only African ruler to wage 32 wars and win 32 victories.
As an avowed African traditionalist he was not Muslim, but he did develop the army, raise awareness of African culture and pioneer new agricultural techniques. After he passed away in 1492, he was succeeded by his son, Sunni Baro. He was soon overthrown by one of his father’s former generals, Muhammad Toure, who would be known as “Askia the Great”.
Askia Muhammad was a pious Muslim, and he had become concerned at the marginalisation of Mali’s ‘ulama by Sunni Ali Ber and Sunni Baro. Askia Muhammad consolidated his realm, and as Christopher Columbus was sailing across the Atlantic with Arab maps in search of Asia, Africa was enjoying another prosperous era in an Empire now much bigger than Europe.
Songhay Empire
At its peak, the Songhay Empire encompassed the Hausa states as far south as Kano (in present-day Nigeria) and much of the territory that had belonged to the Ghanaian and Mali Empires in the east. Askia Muhammad’s policies resulted in a rapid expansion of trade with Europe and Asia.
However, by the late 16th century the Songhay Empire began to decline. A Moroccan army under Pasha Mahmud ibn Zarqun sacked Timbuktu, taking one of its most famous scholars, Ahmad Baba, into captivity. In the 17th century the rise of the European powers, and their opening of the West African sea route, saw the gradual disappearance of the Saharan caravans.
In 1893 the French arrived and by 1898, Mali and much of West Africa – unused to nation-state borders – had become colonised as “French Sudan”. In 1960 Mali achieved independence, but suffered from long periods of political instability and drought. Only in 1992 did the country experience its first truly democratic election.
Today, Mali is a country of great ethnic diversity. In the 20th century it has had to face the daunting trials of military coups, IMF stricture, endemic corruption, modernisation, democratisation, poverty, climate change and diminishing arable land.
South Africa Mali Project
In 2001 South Africa’s President, Thabo Mbeki, conducted an official visit to Mali. It resulted in the “South Africa-Mali Project”, primarily designed at preserving some of Mali’s ancient manuscripts stored at the Ahmad Baba Institute in Timbuktu – but described by University of Cape Town academic, Dr Shamil Jeppie, as far beyond just that.
“For the South African and Malian governments it is also a project of continental and global importance that speaks to the future,” he wrote in “The Meanings of Timbuktu” (an HSRC and CODESIRA publication), adding that the “South Africa-Mali Project” had arisen organically amongst two African states without third-party or international intervention.
And perhaps more significantly, as Dr Jeppie has also noted, Timbuktu will regain its rightful place in history as a centre of paper and books, something giving the final lie to the enduring myth that Africa was always a primeval continent of ignorance.
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