African Art. Maurice Delafosse

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      The Empire of Ghana

      We do not know at what epoch or exactly by whom was founded the kingdom which later gave birth to the Empire of Ghana. Local traditions, confirmed by the works of scholars of Timbuktu and of Arab historians, only let us conjecture that this State goes back at least to the 4th century CE, that its first sovereigns belonged to the white race and that, a certain time after the Hegira, the power passed into the hands of a family of the black race belonging to the Sarakolle people. Arab authors, moreover, inform us that the Empire of Ghana was flourishing in the 9th and the 10th centuries CE, that its decline began towards the middle of the 11th century under the conquering and destructive movement of the Almoravides, that its debris fell under the yoke of the Mandinka and that its capital, last vestige of its sunken glory, ceased to exist after about the middle of the 13th century.

      This capital, whose name is mentioned for the first time, it seems, in the Golden Prairies of Masudi, who died in 956, was visited in the second half of the 10th century by the celebrated Arab geographer lbn-Haukal, and Bekri gives a fairly detailed description of it in the following century. It was called Ghana only by the foreigners and notably the Arabs, who made it known by this name in Europe and Asia. This was not its name but, as Bekri expressly says and as Sudanese traditions confirm, one of the titles borne by the sovereign, who was further designated by that of kaya-maga or simply maga or magan (the master) or again by that of tounka (the prince). The city itself was known to the inhabitants under the name of Kumbi-Kumbi (the butte or tumulus), by which even today its site is pointed out. It is situated between Goumbu and Walata, about a hundred kilometres to the north-northeast of the first of these localities, in a region of the Hodh which the Moors call Howker or Howkar (a geographical term common to many sub-Saharan regions), the Mandinka and the Bambara calling it Bagana or Mara, the Kassonke Bakhunu, and the Sarakolle Wagadu.[7] It extends in a general fashion to the north and to the northeast of Goumbu.

      The explorer Bonnel de Mezieres, who visited and excavated this locality in 1914, found there the vestiges of a great city corresponding very exactly to that described by Bekri, with ruins of hewn stone constructions, sometimes sculptured. The region where Ghana or Kumbi was built is now very arid. In truth, it rains there every year, but there are no rivers and, except at a few points where pools or sheets of not very deep subterranean water exist, the vegetation, although fairly thick in spots, is reduced to thin pasturage, gum-trees, and other spiny bushes. The region contains no village and is traversed only by nomadic Moors and hunters of the Nemadi or Nimadi tribe. But very numerous and extended traces of former habitations and burial places which turn up at every instant, show that the country was formerly inhabited, in part at least, by sedentary peoples, and lead us to suppose that it was better watered than it is today and more suitable for tillage. Besides, Bekri speaks of vast and prosperous fields which extended to the east of Ghana and local traditions are unanimous in attributing the decline of the kingdom and the dispersion of its inhabitants to the drying up of the Wagadu and consequent famine. It is probable that these circumstances had much more influence on the end of the Empire of Ghana than the successive pillages to which the city was subjected by the Almoravides in 1076, by the king of Soso, Sumanguru Kannte, in 1203, and finally by the king of the Mandinka, Sundiata Kelta, towards 1240. A populous city and a flourishing State survived pillage and defeat, but could not resist lack of water and nourishment.

      At that distant epoch when they lent themselves to tillage and a sedentary life, the Bagana or Wagadu and most of the sub-Saharan districts which we unite today under the name of Hodh in the east and Mauritania in the west, must have been inhabited by the Negroes, more or less mixed with Negrillos and white natives of North Africa. These Negroes formed an ensemble, fairly disparate perhaps in certain aspects, which Moorish traditions generally designate by the term Bafur; from them have without doubt gone forth, by ramification, the Songhoy or Songai towards the east, the Serers towards the west and, towards the centre, a great people called Gangara (Gangari in the singular) by the Moors, Wangara by Arab authors and writers of Timbuktu, and more recently comprising, as its principal divisions, the Mandinka properly speaking or the Malinke, the Bambara, and the Jula.

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