Page 78 - Empires of Medieval West Africa

Cha P ter 4

thE soninkE pEoplE

of thE Ghana EmpirE

THE SONINKE WERE ONE OF THE FIRST COMMUNITIES THAT op p os it e
Muslim merchants traded with when they crossed the Sahara Desert This woman of the cattle-
and arrived in the Sahel. The Soninke called their kingdom Wagadu, herding Fula people,
but the Arab geographers who wrote about it called it Ghana. who were among the
In 1067 and 1068, during the period of the Ghana Empire’s greatest populations of Ghana,
Mali, and Songhay, is
power and prosperity, the Arab scholar al-Bakri wrote a description of wearing earrings of pure
the Western Sudan that included a surprising number of details about gold from the ancient
the empire and its capital city. Of all the Arab geographers whose works mines of Mali.
have been translated into English by N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins in
Corpus of Arabic Sources for West African History, al-Bakri provides the
most information about Ghana. He lived in Córdoba, Spain, and never
visited Africa himself, so he had to interview traders who had crossed
the Sahara. Al-Bakri also based his writings on earlier written sources,
including a geographical work by Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Warraq
(904–973).
Since he never saw the place he was writing about, it is understand-
able that he got some facts confused. For example, al-Bakri is one of the
Arab geographers who thought the capital city and its word for king
were both Ghana. He also reported that the king of Ghana at the time
he was writing was named Tunka Manin, who took the throne in 1063.
The Arab geographers apparently did not know that tunka was a title
for Ghana’s rulers (maghan was another, which might be the origin of
the term Ghana).
Al-Bakri tells a story about Basi, Tunka Manin’s uncle, that is simi-
lar to the story of Dinga in the Legend of Wagadu. Basi was the king of
Ghana before Tunka Manin. According to the story, Basi had become