Soninke people

The Soninke (Sarakolleh), Mande speakers of Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia and Guinea, founded the ancient empire of Ghana, Wagadou, around 200 CE and ruled Saharan gold trade for a thousand years, until its fall about 1240. When Ghana broke, Soninke diaspora carried commerce across West Africa: Jakhanke clerics, Maraka merchants, Sosso warriors and Wangara gold traders planted towns from Bamako to Kano, and Senegal still jokes that when Americans landed on the moon, a Soninke was already there. Among the first West Africans to take Islam, about the 10th century, they wove clerical scholarship into merchant lineages. Their ruined capital Koumbi Saleh, half Muslim stone town and half royal sacrificial quarter, remains the sub-Sahara's first great city. Koumbi Saleh's mosque quarter and palace quarter still divide the ruin field. Farmers, herders and the continent's oldest long-distance traders, the Soninke number in the millions today. Soninke traders still work the markets from Dakar to Kano.