Interesting that the only king they can identify is Mansa Musa, and that he keeps popping up on the maps. Given how poorly documented Mansa Musa's reign was, and that the main sources are a small number of Muslim accounts of his Hajj written by people who weren't there when it happened, it seems that to Europeans he was a quasi-legendary and prototypical African king (perhaps similar to the completely legendary Prestor John).
Though I suppose Mansa Musa is held in similar regard today. He's usually the first medieval African ruler I see people bring up, and they often repeat the poorly sourced legend of him being the richest person in history as if it were fact (even this article repeats it).
Less understood about west African history is the sheer volume of un-analysed ancient (mostly Islamic) manuscripts. They were deliberately hidden out of fear from the imperials, and even post-imperials until very recently.
Exceptions to the above, are the Tarikh Al Sudan and Tarikh Al Fattesh, they were first translated into the French 100 years ago but only recently into English (in 1999 by Professor John Hunwick). This is how Mansa Musa was introduced into American speaking world
These chronicles are 300 & 400 years old, substatial in size with many references to Mansa Musa as well as other notables and rulers of the Medieval Mali and Songhai Empire (which is basically the Mali Empire Part 3).
These cross reference whatever independant mentioning’s are found in other medieval sources, Spanish, Egyptian, other. Perhaps confirming Mansa Musa was indeed a corporeal entity!
Obviously these comparisons are of limited value, as the methodology link above bothers to point out, but I don’t think it’s crazy—insofar as even stating “wealthiest person of all time” is meaningful, Mansa Musa looks to be a credible candidate.
Here's what this article says about Mansa Musa. First, very few reliable sources for how rich he was:
> Just how rich was Musa? There’s really no way to put an accurate number on his wealth. Records are scarce, if non-existent, and contemporary sources describe the king’s riches in terms that are impossible for the time.
It then quotes a professor who uses an image from a European map of Mansa Musa created 4 decades after he was born as evidence that he was the richest person of all time.
This is the issue. We have a few second hand accounts around the time of his Hajj saying the Hajj was immensely large and luxurious, and it appears that his reign appears to have coincided with a relative high point for the Mali Empire. That's about it, and it's not nearly enough to say he was the richest person in history, or even that he was the richest leader of the Mali Empire. It's worth noting how little we actually know of the Mali Empire - historians don't even agree about what it's capital was.
I looked into it a couple of years ago, and there was no evidence I could find that he was richer than, say, Mansa Sulayman who lead the empire a few years later. Many people seem to consider the Songhai Empire at its peak richer and stronger than the Malian Empire was. Even if we restrict ourselves to medieval West African polities, it's far from clear that he was the richest.
And considering we're looking at West Africa, another problem arises. A lot of people seem to imagine this wealth as being the amount of gold that gold rich Western African polities had times the value of gold if it suddenly all appeared in the gold poor Mediterranean. But this ignores the fact that getting gold there was a difficult task involving skilled intermediaries. Likewise, salt came down from the Mediterranean to the salt poor Mali Empire, where it fetched a large amount of gold. But I don't think anyone would claim that it would make sense to calculate wealth by seeing how much salt a Mediterranean polity had, and then multiplying that by how much gold you could get to it and the end of trade lines in Mali.
Depending on the specific locale and period in history, there's a lot of people who were likely happier and meaningfully freer than people in 21st century New Zealand and could have expected to live just as long.
Modern people are generally very physically and mentally unhealthy, and most of us work now work in conditions that older peoples would have considered unfree (ie my employment depends on the whims of someone else and my labor primarily benefits them.) I go back and forth as to whether having the Internet and air conditioning make up for it.
I don't think I'd want to be Mansa Musa personally, but I think it's pretty likely he enjoyed his life a lot more than the average person today.
Cob is a perfectly viable construction method. Why should it signify a lack of sophistication or culture. Did England lack culture and sophistication because we did ( and still do) build houses from mud and straw?
Related story of another African king and some of the erasure that enables the bias towards believing Africa had no pre-colonial wealth or tech. From the article:
“When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.”
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/18/story-of-citi...
Love the British library and all its exhibitions. It’s always a joy whenever I am in London to walk into their exhibitions or just walk around. Both the library and British museums are wealth of information that feel local people don’t appreciate much.
I noticed that (the) Manicongo has some folkloric fame in afro-Brazilian culture, the/his name is mentioned in songs and seems to persist in the collective memory. I'd love to know if it's the Manicongo mentioned on these maps that people remember, or if it's the more general title ("king of the congo"), and if there's any story behind this persistent folk knowledge.
Wikipedia is thin on details, perhaps some Brazilian HN members can chime in here?
It's somewhat odd that the article addresses slavery without mentioning that Mansa Musa owned many thousands of slaves and that slavery was prevalent in West and Central Africa during the Medieval, pre-Colonial period.
Slavery existed in every region of the world. This does not negate the destructive affects the Atlantic slave trade had on the continent, its kingdoms and resources. The article did not argue that "Slavery didn't exist under pre-Colonial rule".
Side point, it's always funny to me how a lot of Westerns are hesitant to admit that African societies in Pre-Colonial times had history, science, culture, etc. just as any other society, but very eager to exclaim that they had slavery. It's also as if the existence of slavery does not require a certain type of social organization to have been already developed, which then they claim Africans didn't have.
This is perhaps a provocative point, but legal slavery has not existed in England for about 900 years. The rest of your points are an irrelevant and inaccurate response to my comment, so I won't address them.
No one who lives in either place would consider it a distinction without a difference. Ireland abolished slavey in 1171, although, like the English, they were involved in the Atlantic slave trade.
It’s not surprising I didn’t get the reference: there was no slavery on the Ulster plantation. That was about Protestant colonisation. The local Gaelic Catholics were displaced by Scottish and English colonists, not enslaved.
Plantation implies slavery in the US, but not everywhere.
Sure, why not? Again, a distinction without much of a difference when arguing what has and hasn’t been legal in England (proper, since most of North America WAS England/GB for 150 years) for 900 years. Sharecropping and multiple acts of genocide look pretty similar.
What would it even mean for a human society to not have 'history' or 'culture'? This doesn't make any sense, and I don't think anyone claims this. I think everyone recognizes that almost all history is undocumented, but I don't think anyone would therefore claim it doesn't exist.
I can at least imagine people quibbling about "science"; clearly, once again, every human society that has ever existed in the past two million years has some sort of technological development that required some kind of empirical process of understanding of the world, but I can see why people might not consider that science.
I think people are usually more dismissive of people turning historical molehills into glorious mountains. There's whole industries and groups dedicated to doing this everywhere in the world, on a sliding scale of extremist claims, up to and including "our ancestors had lasers and nuclear weapons, as demonstrated by these descriptions in our religious texts", but naturally you see it more often in places that aren't known as meccas of scientific and technological development...usually for good reason (they weren't). Even neutral well-intentioned people often stretch known historical reality too far in an attempt to make people look better, but it's usually nationalist partisans.
These people (the partisans) would generally be better served making their locales better today than trying to convince everyone of a glorious past that likely didn't exist or has been highly exaggerated.
In Hungary there's no history of such slavery. Peasants liberties were limited but it was not slavery. I feel your perspective is very Anglo American. There are European countries with very little or no culture of slavery.
When discussing African nuances between, slave, peasant, peon, churl, sharecropper, whatever are discarded, and all are designated slaves. In Europe such nuances are emphasised, frankly this is probably done unconciously for egotistical reasons.
Not everyone may find it obvious. Additionally, not elaborating puts the weight on commenters of your post to guess on what you were bringing up to address it.
Though I suppose Mansa Musa is held in similar regard today. He's usually the first medieval African ruler I see people bring up, and they often repeat the poorly sourced legend of him being the richest person in history as if it were fact (even this article repeats it).