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.
