New Take on History of Africa

In July 1324, Sultan Musa of Mali rocked up in Cairo, together with an entourage of over ten thousand slaves and retainers, staying as the guest of the city’s Mamluk governor as he passed through Egypt on the hajj. Fifty years later Cairenes were still talking about it. The Malian ruler flooded the city with gold. Sultan Musa left no Mamluk official or humble petitioner empty-handed, gifting and spending so lavishly that the price of gold collapsed on the Cairo market. His Mamluk host was left full of anecdotes from their conversations: of the magnificence of the Mali kingdom, so vast that it took three years to traverse by foot, and of the fantastic exploits of its royal house, which had sent vast armadas to cross the Atlantic. The brilliance of this African sovereign is thought to have led the Majorcan Jewish cartographers who made the Catalan Atlas in 1375 to place at the centre of the trade routes crossing the Sahara an image of a black king seated on a golden throne and holding up an enormous nugget of gold.