History's Unkindness

Today's article is going to be dedicated to the story of one of the greatest and by far the wealthiest man who ever lived (without prejudice to Solomon). The name of our subject today is Mansa Musa.

According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa 'Mansa Musa, was the ninth Mansa of the Mali Empire, one of the most powerful West African state. At the time of Musa's ascension to the throne, Mali in large part consisted of the territory of the former Ghana Empire, which Mali had conquered. The Mali Empire consisted of land that is now part of Guinea, Senegal, Mauritania, The Gambia and the modern state of Mali. Musa went on hajj to Mecca in 1324, and traveled with an enormous entourage and a vast supply of gold. En route, he spent time in Cairo, where his lavish gift-giving caused a noticeable drop in the price of gold for over a decade and garnered the attention of the wider Muslim world.

Musa expanded the borders of the Mali Empire, in particular incorporating the cities of Gao and Timbuktu into its territory. He sought closer ties with the rest of the Muslim world, particularly the Mamluk Sultanate and Marinid Sultanate. He recruited scholars from the wider Muslim world to travel to Mali, such as the Andalusian poet Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, and helped establish Timbuktu as a center of Islamic learning. His reign is associated with numerous construction projects, including part of Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu. Musa's reign is often regarded as the zenith of Mali's power and prestige.

Musa made his pilgrimage between 1324 and 1325 spanning 2,700 miles. His procession reportedly included 60,000 men, all wearing brocade and Persian silk, including 12,000 slaves, who each carried 1.8 kg (4 lb) of gold bars, and heralds dressed in silks, who bore gold staffs, organized horses, and handled bags. Musa provided all necessities for the procession, feeding the entire company of men and animals. Those animals included 80 camels which each carried 23–136 kg (50–300 lb) of gold dust. Musa gave the gold to the poor he met along his route. Musa not only gave to the cities he passed on the way to Mecca, including Cairo and Medina, but also traded gold for souvenirs. It was reported that he built a mosque every Friday'.

Here's a man whose temporal stay in the Egyptian empire caused the price of gold to crash and sent inflation over the roof and the Egyptian economy would not recover for another ten years. He freely gave to the poor, making everyone rich. The man's entourage were adorned in the best silk to be found in that time, even his slaves and heralds were adorned with gold and had gold staffs. You might want to dispute the possibility of one having so much wealth or gold, but when you look at the lands he ruled over, the best and purest of gold were to be found in these regions, so it does add up.

I'm not here to sing his praise actually. As great as this man was, he has literally disappeared from historical writings today, and he's not the only one. The stories of all the great kings we had in Africa before and during the era of colonisation seem to have died of and altogether rewritten. This is as a result of what Africa and Africans meant and have come to mean in Europe and European perspective.

An African continent where there lived some of the most powerful kings, building massive empires with such wonderful civilization didn't jibe well with the story that they peddled to justify colonization, hence stories that portray any part of Africa as civilised empires with great, powerful and wise rulers were not reported by the European writers of those days as well as those today.

It sad that even today, Europe is yet to come to terms with the fact that there were African civilization that were far ahead of them in terms of development during the colonial era. They were just lucky to be the ones to first know how to manufacture and manipulate gunpowder. It is a recorded fact that the Benin kingdom the Portuguese met was so developed that it was the first place in the world where they saw what has come to be known today as street lights. That doesn't sit well with the story that there were nothing but barbarians using humans for sacrifices.

Conclusion

I guess if you don't see anything worth your time in this article, you can at least take this one; 'history is always written by the conquerors' and it will always be such that it justifies the doings and dealings of the conquerors and the fate of the conquered. Do not trust what you think you know, half the time, what we think we know is what someone wanted us to know, and it ain't necessarily the truth.