When Mansa Musa of Mali made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, he travelled with a caravan of some sixty thousand attendants and so much gold that the alms and spending he scattered through Cairo crashed the price of gold there for a decade — the only individual in recorded history known to have single-handedly distorted a region's economy. Mali at its peak was the wealthiest empire in the world, controlling the goldfields that minted much of medieval Europe's coinage. Its successor, the Songhai Empire (1464–1591), was larger still — and its city Timbuktu housed one of the great learning centres of the Islamic world, with libraries holding tens of thousands of manuscripts in Arabic and African languages.
West Africa's medieval empires made their wealth on the gold-salt trade across the Sahara — a logistically extraordinary commerce in which camel caravans moved gold north toward the Mediterranean and slabs of mined salt, prized as currency in the gold-rich but salt-poor south, down to the savanna. They sat astride the desert's edge at Sahelian cities like Gao, Djenné, and Timbuktu, taxing everything that passed and converting a geographic accident — the meeting of desert and grassland — into the structural foundation of three successive empires: Ghana, then Mali under Sundiata and Mansa Musa, then Songhai under Sonni Ali and the Askia dynasty. The empires were Muslim at the elite level, traditionalist at the popular level, and remarkable for their literacy infrastructure: Timbuktu's Sankoré scholarly community drew students from across the Muslim world and traded books as a luxury good more valuable than most cargo, and its manuscript tradition — on law, astronomy, medicine, and poetry — forms one of the largest premodern African archives, much of it surviving in family collections to this day. The Songhai collapsed in 1591 when a Moroccan expedition of a few thousand carrying firearms — Spanish and renegade-European gunners among them — crossed the Sahara and shattered a far larger army of cavalry and bowmen at Tondibi. It was a stark foreshadowing of the gunpowder transition that would soon decide global politics: the desert that had protected the goldfields for centuries was no longer a moat once a small force with muskets could cross it.
The deliberate erasure of African history in the European colonial imagination — the claim that sub-Saharan Africa had no states worth the name before contact, used to justify the civilizing mission — is one of the more cynical lies of the modern period. Mali, Songhai, Great Zimbabwe, Aksum, and Benin are why the lie was a lie, and the ongoing work of African historians and the rescued Timbuktu manuscripts — smuggled out of the city when jihadists seized it in 2012 — is steadily dismantling it.