Kankan Moussa brings poets and historians home from Mecca

Kankan Moussa ruled Mali from 1297 to 1332 and made his name on the road to Mecca. He met men of learning at the holy places and attached them to his service. Among them were es Sahali, a poet of Arab and Spanish formation, and the historian El Mamer. He carried both back to the Sudan and used them in the administration of his empire, and under their direction the two mosques of Timbuktu and of Gao were raised, Gao being then attached to Mali. The Arab geographer Ibn Battuta left a close description of the customs and ceremonial of the Malian court: the luxury the emperors displayed, the order and regularity of the administrative services, the observance of Koranic rule. Taken together the accounts describe a state with revenue, protocol, architecture and a documented court, at the same moment when Europe was assembling its own. Mali lay south of the Mossi country, on the plateau above the forest.

Abubakri, of the royal house of Mali, fitted out an expedition that sailed west from the African coast in 1312 and reached the land now called Brazil. Mali at that date ran the trade and the schools of the western Sudan, tying Timbuktu, Djenne and Gao to the ocean. Benson reads the voyage as evidence that Muslims from that world reached the Americas long before any Spanish ship did, and suggests the same kingdom may have sent people to Hispaniola before the fifteenth century, where contact with Taino communities would have been possible. No Caribbean record confirms a landing. What the argument fixes is the intellectual weight of the people involved. Imams and marabouts carried Arabic reading and writing, law, poetry, methods for generating divinations by calculation, and the correct procedure for making protective amulets. Two centuries later that same equipment crossed the ocean again in the holds of slave ships, carried by captives who had been separated from their books and had to rebuild them from memory.