The joys of holiday reading – things that you are interested in for no ulterior process…
The Royal Kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay: Life in Medieval Africa is one of those books that does just what it says in the title: this introductory text by Patricia and Frederick McKissack sets out a brief history, a short outline of the life and economies of the kingdoms, and describes the sources on which this information is based – and their contradictions.
That’s great, and is probably all most readers are going to want, since I suspect most will, like I did, come to the subject from the starting point of almost total ignorance. What sparked my interest was a discussion on the Medieval-L listserv, which started with the incidence of the plague in Africa and branched out. I was vaguely aware that there were big and important kingdoms in West Africa at that time, but that knowledge was about as far as it goes.
Royal Kingdoms begins usefully with a map, which places the extent of the medieval kingdoms on a modern map. The first, Ghana (c. 300AD- c.1050AD), was (confusingly) largely in modern-day Mali. The second, Mali (c.1200AD-1500AD), extended beyond that, into the south of what is now Mauritania, most of Senegal and Guinea, and into the western corner of Niger, incorporating the one place name here that almost everyone will know – Timbuktu. Songhay (c.800AD-1580AD) was at its height the largest, extending to cover much of Niger, plus the north of Benin and Nigeria.
The basis of the economy of all of these empires was simple: salt and gold. The latter was so plentiful that it was said in the kingdom of Ghana the value of the two comodities was equivalent, pound for pound. The source of the salt was well-known – the city of Taghaza in the Sahara desert, where the mines were worked by slaves (either captives of war or criminals) whose lives were miserable and short. The city was so miserable that their free overseers worked only on two-month contracts.
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