Kingdoms and Roads

The Sahel

South of the Sahara lies the Sahel, the shore of the desert, where caravans from the north met gold from the south. Islam arrived with the traders. In 1068 the geographer al-Bakri described the capital of Ghana as two towns, one of them Muslim, with twelve mosques, salaried imams and muezzins, and jurists and scholars.¹

Rulers followed in their own time. The kings of Kanem, by Lake Chad, are traditionally said to have accepted Islam about 1085.

Mansa Musa, 1324

Mansa Musa ruled Mali from about 1312 to about 1337. In 1324 he set out for Makkah, and the road took him through Cairo. He gave away so much gold there that the historian al-Umari, who came to the city about twelve years later, found people still talking about it, and reported that the metal had lost value in the market and had not yet recovered.¹

He came home with scholars and books. Tradition credits him with the great mosque of Djinguereber in Timbuktu. In 1375 a mapmaker’s workshop on Majorca drew him on the Catalan Atlas, seated and crowned, holding out a disk of gold. It may be the most famous picture of an African king made in the Middle Ages.²

Songhay

Mali’s place was taken by Songhay. Askia Muhammad, who ruled from 1493 until his son deposed him in 1528, made the pilgrimage in 1496 and 1497 and filled his court with scholars. Timbuktu’s great century was his. It ended in 1591, when an army from Morocco crossed the desert with firearms.

The man from Tangier

Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier in 1304. At twenty-one he left for the pilgrimage, and by his own account he kept traveling for about twenty-nine years and some 75,000 miles.³

Africa frames his book. About 1330 he sailed down the east coast to Mogadishu, Mombasa and Kilwa, which he called one of the most beautiful and well-built towns in the world. In 1352 he crossed the Sahara to Mali. He admired how safe the roads were, how seriously people took the Friday prayer, and how hard children were made to work at memorizing the Quran. He also complained about a good deal. His Rihla was dictated to a scribe named Ibn Juzayy and finished in 1355.

The monsoon coast

On the Indian Ocean, the winds reverse twice a year, and a ship could sail from Arabia to Africa and home again inside twelve months. Islam came down that coast early. At Shanga, in the Lamu archipelago of Kenya, the archaeologist Mark Horton excavated a sequence of mosques, one under another, and dated the earliest to the late eighth century.⁴

At Kizimkazi on Zanzibar, a mosque carries an inscription dated 500 after the Hijrah, which is 1107.⁵ At Kilwa, in Tanzania, the Great Mosque was built in the eleventh century and greatly enlarged in the thirteenth. Its ruins have been on the World Heritage List since 1981.⁶ The coast has its own chapter, The Monsoon Coast.

Sokoto, 1804

In 1804 a scholar and preacher named Usman dan Fodio, born in 1754, launched a reform movement in Hausaland that became the Sokoto Caliphate, one of the largest states in Africa in its century. Its founders were writers before they were rulers. Dan Fodio, his brother Abdullahi and his son Muhammad Bello left hundreds of works between them, and his daughter Nana Asma’u taught the women.

A treaty across the ocean

One more road leads west. On December 20, 1777, the sultan of Morocco, Muhammad III, formally recognized the independence of the new United States, the first foreign ruler to do so. The treaty of peace and friendship the two signed in 1786 is still in force, and the State Department calls it the oldest unbroken treaty the United States has.⁸

By then the other crossing had been running for more than two centuries. That is the next chapter.

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