Ghana Empire

The Ghana Empire, known to its own people as Wagadou, was the earliest of the great West African Sahelian states, a Soninke kingdom that grew wealthy and powerful as an intermediary in the trans-Saharan trade.

Its origins are genuinely obscure: oral traditions reach back centuries, but the first written reference, by the Arab geographer al-Khwarizmi, dates only to 830 CE, and most scholars place the kingdom's emergence as a significant power in the eighth or ninth century. Situated in the western Sahel between the Senegal and Niger rivers, in what is now southeastern Mauritania and western Mali, Ghana commanded the southern terminus of the caravan routes crossing the Sahara. Its rulers, who bore the title 'ghana' (war chief), from which Arab writers derived the kingdom's name, taxed the gold, ivory, and enslaved people moving north and the salt, copper, textiles, and manufactured goods moving south, accumulating great wealth that supported a sophisticated court and substantial urban centres. The capital region, associated with the archaeological site of Koumbi Saleh, reportedly comprised separate royal and merchant towns, the latter inhabited by Muslim traders, while the kings retained their traditional religion. The eleventh-century Andalusian geographer al-Bakri left a detailed description of the kingdom at its height, including the splendour of the royal court of Tunka Manin. From the eleventh century the empire declined, traditionally attributed in part to pressure and disruption associated with the Almoravid movement, as well as to drought, desertification that strained agriculture and pasture, and the breakaway of subject peoples. Weakened and fragmented, the kingdom's capital was occupied by the rival Susu (Sosso) state in 1203, and around 1240 it was finally absorbed into the rising Mali Empire founded by Sundiata Keita. Ghana's wealth and prestige established the template of the Sahelian trading empire that its successors, Mali and Songhai, would follow.

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