The Forgotten Empire That Was Larger Than Rome and Nobody Taught You About It

 In 1324 the Emperor of Mali set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

His name was Mansa Musa. He traveled with a caravan of approximately 60,000 people. He brought 12,000 personal servants. He brought 500 heralds each carrying a golden staff. He brought 80 to 100 camels each loaded with between 300 and 400 pounds of gold dust.

Along the way he gave away so much gold to people he met, to cities he passed through, to mosques and shrines, that he crashed the gold economies of Egypt and the entire Mediterranean region. The price of gold fell so dramatically that it took more than a decade for the markets to recover.

This is documented history recorded by contemporaries in Egypt and the Arab world who witnessed it firsthand.

Mansa Musa is widely considered the wealthiest individual in human history.

Most American students have never heard his name.

What the Mali Empire Was

The Mali Empire rose to prominence in West Africa in the 13th century and reached its peak in the early 14th century under Mansa Musa's reign from 1312 to 1337.

At its peak the Mali Empire covered roughly 1.26 million square kilometers. It was one of the largest empires in the world at that time. It controlled the most important gold and salt trade routes in West Africa. The gold fields of the Mali Empire supplied a significant portion of the gold in circulation across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

The empire's capital Niani was a major city. Timbuktu, a city in the Mali Empire, was one of the most important centers of Islamic scholarship in the world at the time. The Sankore mosque in Timbuktu functioned as a university with an estimated 25,000 students and a library holding hundreds of thousands of manuscripts.

When Mansa Musa returned from his pilgrimage he brought architects from across the Islamic world who built new mosques and buildings throughout his empire. He commissioned a mosque in every city he passed through.

Why This Is Not Taught

The Mali Empire and Mansa Musa's extraordinary wealth are not part of the standard curriculum in most American schools. African history south of Egypt is largely absent from standard history education.

The reasons for that absence reflect the same biases that shaped most western historical education. The civilizations that got attention were the ones that colonizers encountered and wrote about or the ones that were part of the European and Mediterranean world. African empires that were not part of those stories were treated as though they did not exist or were not significant.

Mansa Musa was one of the most powerful rulers of his era. His empire was larger than most European kingdoms of the time. His wealth was genuinely without historical parallel. And he is still largely unknown to most people in the western world.

That is not a gap in the history. That is a choice about whose history gets taught.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Laughter Epidemic of 1962 Infected Hundreds of People in Africa and Lasted for Months

 On January 30, 1962, three girls at a boarding school in Kashasha in what is now Tanzania started laughing.

They could not stop.

The laughter spread. Within days dozens of students at the school were affected. The laughter was uncontrollable and it did not stop after a few minutes or a few hours. It went on for days. Students who were overcome by the laughter also experienced crying, fainting, rashes, and pain.

The school closed on March 18 after 95 of its 159 students had been affected. But that was not the end of it.

How Far It Spread

When the students were sent home to their villages, the laughter went with them. It spread to the communities where those students lived. Other schools in the region were affected. More villages were impacted.

By the time the epidemic finally died down several months later, hundreds of people across multiple communities had been affected. Some individuals experienced symptoms for weeks at a time.

The affected people were not laughing because something was funny. The laughter was involuntary and distressing. People described it as painful. They could not eat or sleep properly while the episodes were happening. Some people had to be restrained during the worst episodes.

What Caused It

No physical cause was ever identified. Doctors who investigated found no infectious agent, no contaminated food source, and no environmental factor that could explain the outbreak.

The scientific consensus is that the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic was a case of mass psychogenic illness. The same phenomenon that likely caused the Dancing Plague of 1518 that we covered in an earlier post. A real physical response spreading through a community through psychological and social mechanisms rather than biological infection.

The school in Kashasha had opened recently and students were reportedly under significant stress. The political situation in Tanganyika was also tense. The country was approaching independence from British colonial rule, which happened in December 1961. The social pressure on communities during that period was real and significant.

Mass psychogenic illness tends to occur in communities under stress. The physical symptoms, whether laughter or dancing or illness, are real even though they do not have a traditional biological cause.

Why This Story Matters

The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic is genuinely strange. It is hard to describe without it sounding made up. But it is fully documented by physicians, government officials, and researchers who investigated at the time.

It is also an important piece of evidence about how human beings respond to extreme social stress. We are social creatures in ways that go deeper than we usually acknowledge. What happens in our communities affects our bodies in ways that science is still working to fully understand.

The laughter epidemic of 1962 is one of the most dramatic demonstrations of that we have on record. And almost nobody knows it happened.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.