African
Empires

Mali · Songhai · Kongo · Great Zimbabwe · Aksum — large, literate, wealthy, confidently negotiated. The story your high school skipped.

Contents

1. Cover
2. Contents
3. An Atlantic-to-Indian-Ocean Africa
4. Aksum, c. 100 — c. 940
5. Ghana, c. 300 — 1240
6. Mali, c. 1235 — 1670
7. Songhai, c. 1464 — 1591
8. Kongo, c. 1390 — 1857
9. Great Zimbabwe, c. 1100 — 1450
10. Swahili coast city-states
11. Asante, Dahomey, Benin, Ethiopia
12. Manuscripts, mathematics, metallurgy
13. Legacy & the colonial rupture
14. Read & watch

A Continent

Africa is fifty-four countries large, three times the size of the contiguous United States, and contains greater human genetic diversity than the rest of the world combined. The history of its complex polities — at the scale that historians usually call "empires" — runs continuously for at least two thousand years. The European fiction that pre-colonial Africa lacked civilisation was always either ignorance or convenience. The continent contained, for most of recorded history, some of the world's wealthiest and most cosmopolitan polities.

This deck attends to a small selection: the trans-Saharan empires of the western Sudan; the Christian kingdom of Aksum and its Ethiopian successor; the Atlantic-facing Kongo; the stone city of Great Zimbabwe and the Swahili trading ports. The choices are not exhaustive — the Mossi, Hausa, Bornu, and Buganda would each merit a section — but they do trace, between them, the major trade systems that integrated the continent before 1500.

A Christian kingdom on the Red Sea

The Land of Gold

The empire of Ghana — unrelated, geographically, to the modern country which took the name in 1957 — sat astride the Saharan trade in gold and salt, in what is now southeastern Mauritania and western Mali. Tenth- and eleventh-century Arabic geographers, especially al-Bakri (writing 1067) and ibn Hawqal, described the capital Koumbi Saleh as a city of two zones: one for the king and the indigenous Soninke, one for Muslim merchants. The king's court was famously rich; al-Bakri described an audience hall in which the ruler sat with golden ornaments in his hair and his horses wore gold-embroidered blankets.

Ghana controlled the source of Saharan gold (the Bambuk and Bure goldfields) and taxed every camel-load passing through. By the late twelfth century, however, the empire weakened — possibly under Almoravid pressure from the north, possibly through ecological strain on the Sahel — and was absorbed into the rising power of Mali.

Sundiata · Mansa Musa · Timbuktu

"He left no virtue untaken. The gold was so much that the price of it fell in Cairo for ten years."— al-‘Umari, on Mansa Musa's pilgrimage of 1324–25

Mali was founded around 1235 by Sundiata Keita, whose victory at Kirina over the Sosso king Sumanguru is the subject of the great Mande oral epic that griots have transmitted for eight centuries. The empire grew to control the gold of Bure, the salt of Taghaza, and the Niger River bend, including the trading and learning city of Timbuktu, which became under Mali (and later Songhai) one of the great Islamic intellectual centres of the world.

The most famous Mansa was Musa I (r. c. 1312–37), whose 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca with — by various accounts — between 8,000 and 12,000 retainers, 100 camels each carrying 300 pounds of gold, and a personal entourage that distributed enough alms in Cairo to depress the Egyptian gold price for a decade. The Catalan Atlas of 1375, drawn for Charles V of France, depicts Musa enthroned in West Africa holding a gold nugget. He may, by some modern reckonings, have been the wealthiest individual in human history; the figure is unverifiable but the impression he left on global memory was vivid.

The Greatest African Empire

Songhai, centred at Gao on the Niger bend, replaced Mali as the dominant western Sudanese power under Sunni Ali (r. 1464–92) and Askia Muhammad (r. 1493–1528). At its peak Songhai was, by area, the largest single empire in African history — over 1.4 million square kilometres, larger than Western Europe. Askia Muhammad reorganised the army into professional units, created a system of provincial governors, and made the haj himself in 1497, returning with the title of Caliph of the Western Sudan from the Abbasid in Cairo.

Timbuktu's Sankoré Madrasah, under Songhai patronage, drew students from across the Islamic world; its scholars produced thousands of manuscripts, of which somewhere between 200,000 and 700,000 survive in private libraries in modern Mali. Leo Africanus, the Granadan-born Andalusian who visited in 1510, reported that "the rich king of Tombuto hath many plates and sceptres of gold" and that books "are sold for more money than any other merchandise."

Songhai fell in 1591 to a Moroccan invasion across the Sahara — 4,000 men, equipped with arquebuses against Songhai's spears and bows. The defeat was catastrophic; the empire dissolved into successor states. The Saadian raid is often cited as the moment the trans-Saharan trade decisively yielded to the Atlantic.

A Christian Kingdom on the Atlantic

The Kongolese state survived the seventeenth-century slave-trade crisis, the Battle of Mbwila in 1665 (where the manikongo Antonio I was killed by Portuguese forces), and a civil war, before declining into vassalage to Portugal in the nineteenth century. Its memory persists in Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban religious traditions, where the linguistic and ritual layers of the Kongo are visible to this day.

The Stone City

Great Zimbabwe — the dry-stone capital that gives the modern country its name — sits on a high plateau in southeastern Zimbabwe. At its peak, between 1300 and 1450, it covered nearly 800 hectares and may have housed 18,000 people, making it one of the largest cities in southern Africa before modern times. Its walls were built of granite blocks fitted without mortar, the largest section (the "Great Enclosure") rising 11 metres and stretching 250 metres in circumference.

The city's wealth was built on cattle and on the long-distance gold trade with the Swahili coast city of Sofala, where Persian, Arab, and (from the early 1500s) Portuguese ships took on Zimbabwean gold for Indian Ocean markets. Chinese Ming porcelain and Persian glazed ware have been excavated at Great Zimbabwe; the city was thoroughly globalised. Its decline around 1450 is debated — possibly drought, possibly soil exhaustion, possibly political fragmentation — and it was effectively abandoned. Its successors at Khami and Mutapa carried the political tradition forward.

Nineteenth-century European colonists, refusing to credit the site to indigenous builders, attributed it variously to Phoenicians, the Queen of Sheba, and lost Israelite tribes. Archaeology since the 1970s has comprehensively settled the matter: Great Zimbabwe was built by the ancestors of the present Shona people, in the local granite tradition, by the same hands whose descendants still farm the surrounding land.

Cities of the monsoon

Strung along three thousand kilometres of east African coast — Mombasa, Malindi, Lamu, Pate, Zanzibar, Kilwa, Sofala — was a chain of independent city-states that traded with the Arabian peninsula, Persia, India, and as far east as China. The Swahili language is the Bantu language of these cities, layered with Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, and Hindi loanwords; "Swahili" itself derives from the Arabic sawāḥil, "coasts."

Kilwa, on an island off the modern Tanzanian coast, was at its fourteenth-century peak the wealthiest city of east Africa, with the Husuni Kubwa palace complex and the Great Mosque. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta visited in 1331 and called it "amongst the most beautiful and well-constructed towns in the world." The Portuguese sacked it in 1505. The Omani Arabs took over from the Portuguese in 1698; the British took over from the Omanis in the late nineteenth century. The cities never quite recovered their pre-Portuguese prosperity, but the language, the literature, and the shared coastal culture persisted, and Kiswahili is today the most widely spoken African language north of the Limpopo.

Asante · Benin · Dahomey · Ethiopia

Manuscripts & Metallurgy

The Timbuktu manuscripts — between 200,000 and 700,000 surviving documents in Arabic, Songhai, and other African languages, written between the 13th and 19th centuries — cover astronomy, mathematics, jurisprudence, medicine, and music. Many were rescued from Islamist destruction in 2013 by a quiet evacuation conducted by Abdel Kader Haidara and the city's manuscript-keeping families. The figure that pre-colonial Africa was an oral civilisation alone is, on inspection of these archives, simply false.

African metallurgy was equally accomplished. The Nok culture of present-day Nigeria was producing terracotta sculpture and iron-smelting from at least 500 BCE — among the earliest iron-working anywhere outside Anatolia. The Ife bronze and brass heads of the 12th–15th centuries are technical and aesthetic equals of contemporary European casting. The blast furnaces of central African Haya iron-smelters, photographed in operation in the 20th century, achieved temperatures above 1,800°C — higher than European blast furnaces of the same era.

The Colonial Rupture

The Berlin Conference of November 1884 to February 1885 is the symbolic turning point. Fourteen European powers, with the United States, divided up Africa with rulers and pencils, frequently across pre-existing political and ethnic lines. By 1914 only Ethiopia and Liberia were not under European control. The colonial period, brief in absolute terms — most of Africa was independent again by 1965 — was disastrous in consequence: extractive economies designed to benefit the metropole, languages and borders imposed without local consent, the deliberate destruction of indigenous institutions, and (in the Belgian Congo, German South-West Africa, and several other places) atrocities approaching the scale of genocide.

The story of African empires before 1885, then, is not a romantic past but a corrective: a reminder that the institutions and capacities of the continent were not given to it by Europe, that they had developed for centuries and millennia in conversation with the wider world, and that what colonialism dismantled (or replaced, or rebranded) was a long, plural, and accomplished civic life. Recovering that story is a precondition for telling modern African history honestly.

Where to go

Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells · François-Xavier Fauvelle, The Golden Rhinoceros · John Reader, Africa: A Biography of the Continent · Basil Davidson, Africa in History · Linda Heywood, Njinga of Angola.

↑ A useful overview. Watch · Mansa Musa Mali Empire →.