SEVEN

West Africa

58

The Keita Kings of Mali

Early seventh century to mid-ninth century/early thirteenth century to mid-fifteenth century

The central and western parts of modern Mali; northern Guinea; Gambia; and Senegal

Mali was the successor, as dominant power in West Africa, to the Soninke kingdom of Ghana, which lay mainly in the Sāḥil to the north of the upper Niger (in the western part of modern Mali and in the south-eastern corner of Mauritania), with its capital, Ghana, possibly to be identified with Kumbi Ṣāliḥ (in the extreme south of modern Mauritania). Ghana had been famed among the Muslim geographers and historians since the eighth century as a prime source of gold. It does not seem that, as was earlier thought, Ghana was directly conquered in the later eleventh century by the Berber Almoravids (see above, no. 14), but it may have been other Berbers from the direction of the Sahara who, in collusion with indigenous Black African opposition elements, brought about the undoubted decline of Ghana in the twelfth century and the spread of Islam in this originally totally pagan land. At the beginning of the next century, the pagan Soninkes of Soso captured the capital of Ghana. The rule of the Soso represented an anti-Islamic reaction in the upper Niger region, but it was followed by a successful Malinke or Mandinka struggle against Soso domination led by Sun Mari Dyāta, a chief of the Keita clan, who then became head of all the Malinke with the title of Mansā.

It was Sun Dyāta’s successors who made Mali into a powerful kingdom, with its capital probably located at Nyane on the Sankarani, a right-bank affluent of the upper Niger (although the site of the capital of Mali apparently varied at different times). It developed strong cultural and religious links with the Islamic lands of North Africa and Egypt, with diplomatic and religious connections with the Marīnids of Morocco (see above, no. 16) and the Mamlūks of Egypt (see above, no. 31). Several of the kings of Mali made the Pilgrimage to Arabia, with that of Mansā Mūsā I (in whose reign Mali was visited by the Moroccan traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭa) achieving special fame. Even so, animist concepts remained strong beneath the veneer of official and ruling-class Islam, and the local form of Islam developed clear syncretist elements within it. There was a flourishing trans-Saharan commerce in such items as gold and slaves, with Timbuktu, near the northernmost point of the Niger bend and probably in origin a Touareg settlement, developing in the fourteenth century as a terminus for the caravan traffic and as a significant intellectual centre of Islamic learning.

In the later fourteenth century, Mali was weakened by succession disputes, Early in the next century, it lost Timbuktu and much of the Sāḥil zone to the Touaregs, and was threatened by the rise of Songhay (see below, no. 59), which stripped Mali of its eastern and central lands, so that it became confined to the Malinke heartland in approximately what is now western Mali and Guinea, where it survived as a power of only local significance; it withstood Moroccan pressure at the end of the sixteenth century, but by 1081/1670 it was eclipsed by the rising Bambara states of Segu and Karta.

EI¹ ‘Soso’ (Maurice Delafosse); EI² ‘Ghāna’ (R. Cornevin), ‘Mali’ (N. Levtzion).

J. Spencer Trimingham, A History of Islam in West Africa, London 1962, 47–83, with a chronological table at p. 236.

Nehemia Levtzion, ‘The thirteenth- and fourteenth-century kings of Mali’, Journal of African History, 3 (1963), 341–53, with a genealogical table at p. 353.

idem, Ancient Ghana and Mali, London 1973, chs 5–7, with a genealogical table at p. 71.

M. Ly Tall, L’empire du Mali, Dakar 1977.