In 1324, the city of Cairo was taken by storm by one of the most
awe-inspiring sights its citizens had ever seen. Marching through its
winding streets was an entourage of thousands of African soldiers,
courtiers, traders, scholars and slaves all ladened in gold.
Horses and camels with gold leafing on their fur pulled vast amounts
of riches that were handed out to the poor and traded for goods.
So much gold was handed out that the Cairo economy crashed and would not
recover for ten years. At the helm, sitting on a gold throne and holding
a gold staff was their leader, widely believed to be the richest
human in the history of the world, Mansa Musa, the emperor of Mali.
In the era of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Wall Street and big tech,
it is hard to fathom a more prosperous time in human history.
However, many believe Mansa Musa's wealth outdoes that
of all modern billionaires.
Musa was the crowning jewel of a long lineage of West African
imperial rulers. Depending on who's doing the estimating,
people will suggest that his net worth, adjusted for inflation,
was $400 billion, or $500 billion, or $600 billion, people don't really know.
There is a lot of subjectivity to that type of claim,
but it's really based on the kind of access Mansa Musa had to gold.
Mansa Musa ruled over the Mali Empire,
a vast and powerful entity that stretched from the Atlantic
coast of western Africa, to the deserts of modern-day Niger.
This region that the Mali Empire extended across was a source for
some of the purest gold that circulated in that period of time,
when the most powerful polities were largely based on a gold standard.
In the medieval period, without any question, there is
probably only one state that has anything like the military, economic, and
political strength of the empire of Mali and that s probably China.
A devout Muslim, Mansa Musa's legendary trip to Cairo
was part of a pilgrimage to Mecca. Inspired by the experience,
he returned to Mali in 1325 and kickstarted a golden age for one
Africa's most famous cities.
He invests the resources of his empire into cultivating the really,
really important Islamic scholarly tradition in west Africa.
In Timbuktu, for example, there are 80 universities in the 1400s.
This is a complex, literate society. There are scholars from all over
the world, literally, who are coming to learn Islamic law, and astronomy,
and theology and these sciences in this west African empire.
The Mali empire continued to thrive for the rest of Mansa Musa's life.
Even after his death, in approximately 1337,
the empire continued to flourish under the rule of his sons.
However, with the rise of rival empires and new forms of trade,
the empire went into decline in the 15th Century.
Despite his global legacy, Mansa Musa has largely disappeared from
the Western historical imagination.
Colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade
have a major impact on the way that
the Euro-American world writes about and perceives Africa and Africans.
Stories of Africans who were writing dozens of languages in a city like
Timbuktu, who were the wealthiest and most powerful kings on the planet,
don t jive well with what Africa has come to mean in European
discourse. This one of those treasures of African history,
that if we can unthink some of our received wisdom of what Africa is and isn't
If we can unlearn some of the things that we think that we know about Islam,
we can have a glimpse back into an entirely different world,
before the contemporary discourses of racial
marginalization came into being.
A black Muslim ruler could rightfully consider himself second to none.