village-states were apt to be gobbled up by more powerful neighbors. Thus
from at least the thirteenth century, Africa produced true empires; and from
diversity there emerged a high degree of sophistication in at least some
African states.
The first of these was the Mali empire, which from the thirteenth to the
fifteenth centuries covered most of the modern states of Senegal, Guinea,
Mali, Upper Volta, and Nigeria, an area about the size of modern France.
Mali’s ruling elite came from a single language group, speakers of Mande,
but it absorbed or dominated states speaking a number of languages. The
empire was divided into semiautonomous townships, from each of which it
drew taxes. Royal slaves, whose status was roughly comparable to that of
European serfs, farmed the great basin of the Niger River as intensely as the
Nile, Indus, and Yangtze basins have been farmed. The bounty of the river
gave Mali an agricultural surplus, which was supplemented by long-range
trade in ivory, gold, and slaves with faraway Egypt and North Africa.
Together agriculture and commerce produced riches that encouraged the
growth of schools, libraries, and other civic institutions manned by an edu-
cated elite. Although he visited it only in the sixteenth century, long after its
great period, Hassan az-Zaiyati (“Leo Africanus”) found the capital,
Timbuktu, to be a city some 12 miles in circumference, replete with stores
and artisans’ workshops. The government was well organized, with a large
and effective bureaucracy, a stable system that made good use of local
autonomy and a professional army composed, as Zaiyati tells us, of “3,000
or so cavalry and uncountable foot soldiers.”
Although contemporary Europeans regarded Timbuktu as almost
unimaginably remote, its contacts with the Islamic world were impressive.
Its well-financed, experienced, and venturesome merchants spread trade
networks over much of Africa. Since it was an Islamic state—rich, devout,
and well-organized—the emperor Musa was able in 1325 to lead some
10,000 Malians thousands of miles across Africa through Cairo to perform
thehajjin Mecca. This unprecedented and quite remarkable journey leads
me to discuss the eastern influence on Atlantic Africa, religion.
In Musa’s time, large parts of Atlantic Africa had become Muslim, as
Islam was spread among their peoples by merchants. This is well known.
However, there is an even older thread of influence from north and east that
90 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA