after their defeat, the religion of their conquerors, afterwards
becoming the staunchest Muslims of all the western Sudan,
carrying with them the Muslim faith into the numerous regions of
the Senegal, the Sahel and the Massina where they settled after
the fall of Ghana and the dispersion of its inhabitants, passing
the religion on to that curious population, commercial and enter-
prising, the Jula, who are considered to be an issue of the
Sarakolle of Dia or Diakha (Massina) and of the Djenné and
who, in their turn, propagated Islam as far as the northern
boundary of the great equatorial forest. From the end of the 11th
century, less than fifty years after the first preaching of Abdallah
and his missionaries, Islam attained some points situated at least
400 kilometres from the coast of the Gulf of Guinea; the Muslim
Jula, attracted into this region by the abundance of kola-nuts,
had founded Bego near the elbow formed by the Black Volta at
the height of 8°north latitude, not far from the present village of
Banda or Fougula (English Gold Coast). This city soon became
a very important metropolis and an active centre of commerce
and Islamic propaganda; towards the end of the 14thor the be-
ginning of the 15thcentury, its inhabitants dispersed and went to
settle farther to the west near modest hamlets, such as Gotogo
(Bonduku) and Kpon (Kong), situated in the present French
colony of the Ivory Coast, transforming them rapidly into
veritable cities, enriching themselves by commerce in kolas,
cattle, fabrics, and gold-powder, and introducing habits of intel-
lectual research which have continued a long time after.
But we must return to the history of the struggle between the
Almoravides and Ghana. In 1057, Abubekr ben Omar succeded
his brother Yahia as chief of the former and thus begun the
conquest of southern Morocco with the aid of Abdallah ben
Yassine. The death of the latter, happening unexpectedly in 1058
or 1059, made Abubekr the sole and uncontested master of the
Almoravides. The following year, leaving his cousin Yussof ben
Tachfine to finish the conquest of Morocco and to found
Marrakech, Abubekr betook himself in the direction of the Adrar
and of the Tagant, where the Berber tribes were at war with each
other. After restoring peace among them and reasserting his own
authority, he gave all his efforts to the destruction of the empire of
Ghana. Ghana, however, did not succumb until the end of some
fifteen years, after a desperate resistance in the course of which
the Berber troops experienced more than one defeat. At last, in
1076, the Almoravides captured the old Sudanese city and put to
the sword all the inhabitants who would not embrace Islam. Eleven
years later, in 1087, shortly after the taking of Seville by Yussof
ben Tachfine, which gave Spain to the Almoravides who were
already masters of Morocco, Abubekr was killed in the Adrar
during the course of a new revolt of his most direct subjects, and
the power of his sect and his dynasty, which had just asserted itself
in such a brilliant manner in the north of Africa and the south of
Europe, disappeared from the very country that had constituted its
point of departure.At any rate, Ghana was never able to recover its past grandeur.
Several provinces of the empire had profited by the struggle
between the Sisse and the Almoravides to free themselves from the
tutelage of the supreme tounka or maga and had become
independent kingdoms, each of which had its own tounka or
maga, belonging to some one of the great Sarakolle families
among whom the sovereigns of Ghana chose the governors of the
distant districts of the empire.TThhee KKiinnggddoomm ooff DDiiaarraa
It is thus that the Sarakolle dynasty of the Niakhate founded at
Diara, to the northeast, near the present post of Nioro, the
kingdom of the Kaniaga or of the mana or mana-magan, which
was not slow to become master of the Tekrur and to include nearly
all of what now constitutes the Sudanese Sahel, that is to say, the
larger part of the former southern dependencies of Ghana. Around
1270, the Diawara dynasty replaced the Niakhate at Diatra; it
maintained itself in power until 1754, the epoch of the conquest
of the Kaniaga by the Bambara-Masasi.In the interval, the authority of the Diawara lost its vigour and
was undermined little by little by the continually growing
power of the Mandinka Empire, to which the Kaniaga had
become vassals towards the end of the 13thcentury or at the
beginning of the fourteenth, later changing their suzerain and
becoming incorporated, in the 16thcentury, into the Songhoy
Empire of Gao.TThhee KKi innggddoomm oof f SSoos soo
Farther to the east, about midway between Goumbu and
Bamako, is a village by the name of Soso which also had its
hour of celebrity. Here, the kings of Ghana supported aFunerary figure’s mask(?), 12th-13thcenturies.
Interior delta of Niger, Mali.
Terracotta, 55 cm.
Musée Dapper, Paris.