Empire of Ghana

Politics and institutions

The Empire of Ghana — Wagadou to its Soninke founders — flourished from roughly the fourth to the eleventh century in the Sahel between the Senegal and Niger rivers, in what is now southeastern Mauritania and western Mali. Its king bore the title ghana, 'war chief,' and ruled a tribute empire: vassal kingdoms paid gold, and the capital, Koumbi Saleh, held the royal court, the treasury and an administration that impressed the eleventh-century geographer al-Bakri — a vizier, interpreters, officials who heard grievances at the palace gate. Succession ran through the sister's son, a matrilineal custom that repeatedly puzzled Muslim observers. Weakened after the Almoravid advance of 1076 and pressed by Berber groups and Sosso rivals, the empire contracted through the twelfth century; its lands passed to Sosso and then, after 1200, to the Mali Empire of Sundiata.

Economy and finance

Ghana grew rich as the hinge of the gold–salt trade. Gold mined in the savanna south — in Bambuk, Bure and the Wangara country — moved north through Ghana's markets; salt from the Saharan mines of Taghaza and Awlil moved south; and the king taxed both directions, with al-Bakri reporting a royal monopoly: the largest gold nuggets belonged to the king, and only dust reached the market. Koumbi Saleh, a twin city of stone houses and mosques where the Muslim traders' town adjoined the royal settlement, counted tens of thousands of residents and served caravans crossing six hundred miles of desert. Camels made the trade possible; Ghana's control of the wells and routes made it profitable. Sorghum and millet, iron-working and livestock sustained the countryside beneath the commerce.

Society and culture

Ghana's court kept its own religion even as Islam filled its markets: the kings honored ancestral and fertility cults — the epic of Wagadu told how the serpent Bida guarded the land's gold — and Islamization of the rulers was late and partial, while the Muslim traders' quarter with its mosques and scholars flourished beside the palace. Soninke was the language of the state, and oral epic, above all the Wagadu cycle and the legend of Gassire's lute, carried its memory after the empire's fall. The city's stone architecture, rare in the Sahel, and its cosmopolitan market — Berbers, Wangara traders, farmers and herders — made Ghana, in Arab eyes, the land of gold, and its standard of living a byword among the geographers.

Military and frontiers

Al-Bakri could believe the king of Ghana commanded two hundred thousand warriors; the true figure mattered less than the system behind it — tribute from vassals, garrisons on the routes, and a monopoly of arms that kept cavalry close to the crown. The army fought with bows, spears and horsemen to hold the caravan roads against desert raiders, and its control of the western routes provoked the century's defining war: the Almoravid movement, rising among the Sanhadja Berbers, stormed Awlil and, by the traditional account, took Koumbi Saleh in 1076. Whether or not the Almoravids held Ghana for long — modern scholars doubt it — the blow broke the monopoly of the routes. Within a century the Sosso were masters of the old empire's heartland, and Mali was rising behind them.

Foreign relations

Ghana's diplomacy was the management of the desert frontier. To the north lay the Berber confederations and, after the 1050s, the Almoravids, whose reforming zeal joined to holy war turned trade partners into conquerors; to the south, tributary chiefs brought gold from the forest edge. News of Ghana travelled with the caravans into Muslim Spain, where al-Bakri wrote his account in Córdoba without ever crossing the Sahara, and into the geographies of al-Idrisi. The empire served as the gate between the Mediterranean world and the goldfields of sub-Saharan Africa: every party — Berber camel drivers, Soninke kings, Muslim merchants — needed the passage, and Ghana taxed the need. When its control of the routes slipped, the empire's reason for being slipped with it.

Legacy and influence

Ghana's afterlife exceeds its territory. When the Gold Coast became independent in 1957 it took the name Ghana — chosen by Kwame Nkrumah to honor a medieval empire of gold whose lands lay five hundred kilometers away — and the ancient polity became a pan-African symbol. Koumbi Saleh, excavated in the twentieth century, remains the empire's monumental trace, and the gold–salt system it perfected passed intact to Mali and Songhai, which built on Ghana's routes and precedence. The Soninke diaspora, the Wangara traders, carried Ghana's commercial culture across West Africa. Historians still argue over the Almoravid conquest, but agree on the essential: for four centuries, the wealth of the western Sudan was organized at Koumbi Saleh.