The Malian Empire

By Archaeo Histories

The erasure of the Kingdom of Kush, the Malian Empire, the Kingdom of Dahomey, Great Zimbabwe, and dozens of other sophisticated African civilizations from global historical education was not an accidental omission — it was a deliberate intellectual project pursued by European colonial academics who understood that the premise of African inferiority required the elimination of evidence that Africans had built literate, mathematically sophisticated, architecturally advanced, and diplomatically complex civilizations centuries before European contact.

The Mali Empire at its peak under Mansa Musa in the early 14th century controlled territory larger than Western Europe, administered a complex trans-Saharan trade network in gold, salt, and manuscripts, and maintained the University of Sankore in Timbuktu, which enrolled an estimated 25,000 students and housed a library containing between 400,000 and 700,000 manuscripts covering mathematics, astronomy, medicine, law, and theology. When Mansa Musa performed his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, his caravan included 60,000 people and 100 camels each carrying 136 kilograms of gold. He distributed so much gold during his passage through Egypt that he caused a decade long inflation of gold's value across North Africa and the Middle East, a macroeconomic event documented by Arab historians and economists of the period.

Great Zimbabwe, the stone city complex in present day Zimbabwe whose construction required sophisticated engineering knowledge and administrative organization to quarry, transport, and assemble without mortar, was attributed by early European colonial archaeologists to Phoenicians, Arabs, and ancient Israelites in sequence, each attribution motivated by the determination to find any explanation other than the one supported by the archaeological evidence: that it was built by the ancestors of the Shona people who inhabited the region when Europeans arrived. The archaeologist J. Theodore Bent, who conducted the first formal excavation in 1891, was explicitly commissioned by Cecil Rhodes with instructions to find evidence of a non-African origin.

The systematic suppression of African historical scholarship extended into the colonial educational apparatus, which ensured that generations of both African and European students received no substantive instruction in pre-colonial African civilization, creating an intellectual vacancy that colonial racial ideology filled with the fiction of a continent without history.

Comment by Tom Simth

The huge Mali Empire (1214-1610) held about one third of its population (170 million) in slavery, and created the colossal West-African slave trade infrastructure, terrorising African neighbours. Great Zimbabwe was a city, abandoned in the 16th or 17th century. The Kingdom of Dahomey was famous for its slavery, slave trade and human sacrifices (see picture).

Which other sophisticated African civilization are you referring to

Comment by Prata do Povo

Most societies had slaves. Romans had slaves and western christianity keep having slaves, the modern word is due to the huge enslavement of east slavs, that just ended with the expansion of early Russia.

Comment by Tom Smith

Yes, there was slavery in the Roman Empire (primarily war captives, abandoned children, debt servitude). But it gradually stopped from the beginning of Late Antiquity (500 CE). 

In Africa and Arabia slavery lasted many centuries longer, until deep into colonial times. 

In Africa slavery continued until it was stopped by western powers (but it even continues today in Mauritania, Congo, Sudan, Ghana, Libya, plus child soldiers in multiple conflicts, etc).

Comment by Beau Okechukwa

You'd have to understand slavery is a European term, we used indentured servitued, the terms have been conflated intentionally. I understand your mission though.

Comment by Tom Smith

Slavery in Africa was "indentured servitude"?

If you capture innocent people from neighbouring tribes and regions, transport them over vast distances, make them work their whole life in mines or palm oil plantations, sell them in slave markets (Ghana alone had 64) or kill them in human sacrifices (pictures are Dahomey), you call that "indentured servitude"?

You are denying realities.

I think too many African "influencers" unfortunately try to impregnate African people with feelings of victimhood, revenge, powerlessness and hatred, thereby destroying initiative, self-reliance and pride.

Hammering on "white power structure" does not help anybody.

Asian countries are developing fantastically, because they did not make this silly mistake.