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 inhab-
ited 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.
It is in this region and among these Bafur, undoubtedly already
ramified, that the immigrants of the Semitic race treated in the
last chapter probably settled, as they pass for having colonised
particularly the Massina and the Wagadu, and for having
founded the kingdom and the city of Ghana. As we have seen,
these immigrants probably also included farmers and shepherds.
However considerable their number, it was certainly very inferior
to that of the Negroes in the midst of whom they settled and over
whom they established their domination. There must have been,
from the very beginning, a number of unions between the whites
and the blacks and of these unions were born, it seems, two very
important populations, each of which, in turn, was to play a role
of the first order in the history of the western and central Sudan
and in the development of its civilisation.
Even in Ghana, in the Wagadu, in the Massina, and at still other
places, the union of the Semites, for the most part sedentary, with
the Wangara, who were considerably more numerous than the
former, probably engendered the people who give themselves the
name of Sarakolle, that is to say, “white men”, in memory of one
of their ancestors. They are called by several Sudanese tribes
Soninke, by the Moors Assuanik; the Bambara denominate them
Mara-ka or Marka (people of the Mara or Wagadu) and the Arab
authors and the Songhoy of Timbuktu designate them by the term
Wakore. These people spoke a language closely related to that
of the Wangara; it became the customary language of Ghana
and is still today that of the Sarakolle of the Sahel and of Senegal,
of the sedentary inhabitants of the black race called Azer or Ahl-
Masine (people of the Massina), of certain oases such as Tichit,
and finally of some tribes who have either adopted the errant
habits of their Moorish neighbours or conserved those of their
white ancestors, for example, the Guirganke shepherds and also,
it is believed, of the Nemadi hunters.To the west of Ghana, in the region of the Termes pastures, the
mixture of the nomadic Semites with the Serers and especially
the long cohabitation of these Semites in the midst of the Serers
must have given birth to the Fulani or Fulbe people, who speak
a language quite near to that of the Serers and who later
swarmed towards the Massina and, on the other side, towards
the Tagant and the Futa-Toro. They later sent forth groups to the
southwest into the Futa-Jallon, to the east and to the southeast in
the bend of the Niger, to Hausaland, Adamawa, and other
countries neighbouring Lake Chad.However, in Ghana itself, after a succession of princes of the white
race who, according to the Tarikh es-Sudon, must have numbered
44, of whom 22 came before the Hegira and 22 after it, but of
whom the last, according to the Tarikh el-Fettach, was contem-
porary with Mohammed, the power passed to the Sarakolle
dynasty of the Sisse which perhaps, as its present descendants
claim, was related to the dynasty of the white race and, in a way,
constituted only a continuation of it, more or less mixed with Negro
blood. However that be, it is under the reign of these Sisse, whom
Masudi and other Arab authors formally claim to have been
Negroes, that the State of Ghana attained its apogee. In the
testimony of Bekri, of Yakut and of Ibn-Khaldoun, its power made
itself felt from the 9thcentury over the Zenaga or Sanhaja Berbers
(Lemtuna, Goddala or Jeddala, Messufa, Lemta, etc.) who had
shortly before pushed their southern advance-guards as far as the
Hodh and into what is now Mauritania. Howdaghost, the capital
of these Berbers, undoubtedly situated to the southwest and not far
from Tichit, was vassal to the Negro king of Ghana and paid
tribute to him; an attempt at independence on the part of the chief
of the Lemtuna led, about 990, to an expedition of the king of
Ghana, who captured Howdaghost and reaffirmed his authority
over the sedentary Berbers and over the “veiled Zenaga” of the
desert, as several Arab authors express themselves.To the south, the dependencies of Ghana stretched to the other
side of the Senegal river and as far as the gold mines of the
Faleme and of the Bambuk, whose product fed the treasury of the
Sisse and served to operate fruitful exchanges with Moroccan
caravans coming from Tafilalit and from the Dara; they extended
even as far as Manding, on the upper Niger. Towards the east,
the limits of the kingdom reached nearly to the region of the lakes
situated to the west of Timbuktu. To the north, its influence was felt
in the very heart of the Sahara and its renown had penetrated as
far as Cairo and Baghdad.However, at the beginning of the 11thcentury, Islam began to
penetrate the Berbers of the Sahara and the edge of Sudan, the