50 Fun Facts About West African Kingdoms

Which emperor of Mali gave away so much gold in Cairo on his 1324 pilgrimage that its value fell?

Mansa Musa is often called the richest person in history, though historians say his wealth is impossible to calculate. He travelled to Mecca with a vast entourage and is said to have given gold to the poor along the route.

Which desert-edge city with the Sankoré mosque became a famed centre of Islamic scholarship?

Timbuktu was a world centre of Islamic learning from the 13th to the 17th century, yet English dictionaries now list its name as a metaphor for any faraway place.

Which mineral, cut into slabs at Taghaza in the Sahara, did desert caravans carry south to barter for gold?

Salt was so plentiful at Taghaza that the miners' own houses were built from slabs of it, yet so scarce in the gold country to the south that it was carried there over huge distances.

In Ashanti legend, which royal object did the priest Okomfo Anokye call down from the sky?

A golden stool is said to house the spirit of the whole Ashanti nation, living, dead and yet to be born. It must never touch the ground, so it rests on a blanket of its own.

Which rice dish takes its name from the Wolof people, whose medieval empire ruled much of Senegambia?

Jollof is now cooked right across West Africa, where a friendly rivalry over which country makes it best has become known as the Jollof wars.

Which British colony took the name of the medieval Ghana Empire when it became independent in 1957?

Gold Coast took its new name under Kwame Nkrumah, even though the medieval empire had lain far to the north-west, entirely outside the new country's borders.

Which British coin, first struck in 1663, was named after the part of West Africa that supplied its gold?

Guinea coins made with gold shipped by the Royal African Company carried a tiny elephant, the company's emblem, beneath the monarch's head.

Which hereditary West African storytellers memorised the histories of kings and passed them on aloud?

Griots traditionally married only into other families of their kind, so the craft of memorising and performing history stayed in the same bloodlines for centuries.

Which trickster of Ashanti folk tales, usually pictured as a spider, lives on in the stories of Jamaica?

Anansi takes his name from the Akan word for spider, and his tales reached the Caribbean with Ashanti people who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas.

Which founder of the Mali Empire, unable to walk as a boy in legend, is the hero of a famous oral epic?

Sundiata Keita is remembered as the Lion of Mali because his name joins his mother's name, Sogolon, to the word for lion. He won his empire at the Battle of Kirina around 1235.

Which river, Africa's third longest, bends in a great arc past the trading cities of the Mali and Songhai empires?

The Niger rises near the coast yet runs inland towards the Sahara before swinging back south-east, a boomerang course that baffled geographers for two centuries.

Despite their name, the Benin Bronzes taken by British troops in 1897 are mostly made of which alloy?

Brass reached Benin partly as manillas, bracelet-shaped ingots bought from European traders, which the royal casters melted down to make their plaques and portrait heads.

Which Malian town's Great Mosque, the world's largest mud-brick building, is replastered by residents every year?

Djenné has had a mosque on the site since around the 13th century, but the building that stands today dates only from 1907. Its yearly replastering is a festival that opens with a race to deliver the plaster.

Which brightly patterned cloth do Ashanti weavers in towns such as Bonwire make from strips of silk and cotton?

Kente weavers, one oral tradition says, took their first designs from the web of a spider.

Which city, founded in the 1680s by King Osei Tutu, was the capital of the Ashanti Empire?

Kumasi owes its site, oral tradition says, to the priest Okomfo Anokye, who planted seeds in two places and named the capital where one took root.

Which North African state sent an army across the Sahara with cannons to crush the Songhai Empire in 1591?

Morocco's force was led by Judar Pasha, a Spanish eunuch captured as a child, and its gunpowder weapons, which the Songhai lacked, decided the Battle of Tondibi.

Which animals did the Songhai army stampede at the enemy at Tondibi in 1591, only for gunfire to turn them back?

Cattle, about 1,000 of them, were meant to break the invaders' lines and shield the Songhai infantry, but the noise of cannon sent the herd charging back into its own side.

Which Tangier-born traveller crossed the Sahara in 1352 to visit the Mali Empire and described its royal court?

Ibn Battuta covered more ground than any other explorer before modern times, and he reached Mali by joining a caravan across the desert.

According to his successor's own account, an emperor of Mali launched 2,000 ships to explore which body of water?

Atlantic Ocean voyages of 200 and then 2,000 ships are known only from the story his successor told, and some historians suspect he invented it to explain how he took the throne.

Which veiled Saharan nomads, nicknamed the Blue People for their indigo cloth, long ran the desert caravans?

Tuareg men, not women, traditionally wear the face veil, and taking it on marks a boy's passage to manhood. Its indigo dye can stain the skin beneath, which is how the nickname arose.

Which European country built Elmina Castle in 1482 to trade for West African gold, long before its rivals arrived?

Portugal held the fort until the Dutch seized it in 1637, and it is now the oldest surviving European building in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Mossi Kingdoms, whose chief ruler was titled King of All the World, lay in which modern country?

Burkina Faso still has Mossi kings, who reign as traditional monarchs inside the republic. Their ancestors dominated the upper Volta region for hundreds of years.

Which small sea shells served as money across West Africa's kingdoms, even in regions far inland?

Cowries stayed in use for so long that parts of British West Africa still accepted them for tax payments in the early 20th century.

Which bitter, caffeine-rich forest seed did caravans carry north from the Ashanti Empire to savanna markets?

Kola nuts went into the first recipes for Coca-Cola in 1886 and Pepsi-Cola in 1893, which is how cola drinks got their name.

Which dry belt south of the Sahara, home to the Ghana, Mali and Songhai empires, has a name meaning 'shore'?

Sahel comes from the Arabic for coast or shore, a figure of speech that treats the Sahara as a sea of sand and its southern edge as the far side.

The Kanem–Bornu Empire, one of the longest-lived in world history, grew up around which African lake?

Lake Chad sat on trade routes that linked Egypt in the east, the Sahara to the north and the states to the west, and that traffic sustained the empire for centuries.

The Oyo Empire could keep horses for its feared cavalry because its heartland was mostly free of which insect?

Tsetse fly bites spread nagana, a disease that strikes horses, so the mounts Oyo bought from the north survived only where the insect was scarce.

The famous Benin mask of Queen Mother Idia, emblem of the 1977 FESTAC festival, is carved from which material?

Ivory was prized at Benin's court partly for its whiteness, a sign of ritual purity. Idia herself is remembered in Edo tradition as the only woman who went to war.

Which European power fought Samori Ture's Wassoulou Empire for sixteen years before capturing him in 1898?

France refused his wish to return home after his capture and sent him into exile in Gabon instead.

Which riverside city, sacked by an invading army in 1591, was the capital of the Songhai Empire?

Gao was conquered by the Mali Empire near the end of the 13th century, before the Songhai won it back and built an empire of their own around it.

Which warrior king, who reigned from 1464 to 1492, turned the small Songhai state into an empire larger than Mali?

Sonni Ali built a war fleet on the river and used it to besiege a rival trading city until hunger forced it to surrender. One chronicle says he later drowned while crossing the same river.

Which Songhai emperor, a general who seized the throne in 1493, is said to lie in a pyramid-shaped mud tomb?

Askia Muhammad gave so freely on his pilgrimage that he came home deep in debt, yet the journey won him the prestige of the title of caliph.

Which Hausa city-state, famed for indigo-dyed cloth, still has old dye pits in use near its Kurmi Market?

Kano had clay walls ten miles long and thirty feet high when the German explorer Heinrich Barth visited in 1851, enclosing a busy trading and manufacturing town.

Which herding people, led by the scholar Usman dan Fodio, overthrew the Hausa kings to found the Sokoto Caliphate?

The Fulani jihad launched in 1804 created one of the largest states in Africa, linking more than 30 emirates, and inspired similar holy wars right across the savanna.

Which Yoruba god of thunder and lightning is said to have ruled as the third king of the Oyo Empire?

Shango was made a god only after his death, and his worshippers in Yorubaland avoid eating cowpeas for fear of bringing his lightning down on themselves.

Which Yoruba holy city, where tradition says the world was created, is famed for lifelike sculpted heads?

Ile-Ife's artists gave their kings and gods large heads because they believed a person's inner power was held there. The finest pieces date from between 1200 and 1400.

Which technique did the royal metalworkers' guild of Benin use to make the plaques that covered the palace walls?

Lost-wax casting demanded such specialised skill that the casters formed a royal guild, which is still based on Igun Street in Benin City.

To which Indian Ocean islands did Britain exile the Ashanti king Prempeh I after deposing him in 1896?

The Seychelles became his home from 1900, after spells in Elmina and Sierra Leone, and Britain let him return in 1924 only as a private citizen.

Which Queen Mother of Ejisu led the Ashanti war of 1900 against Britain and died in exile in 1921?

Yaa Asantewaa raised an army of about 5,000 and laid siege to the fort where the British had taken refuge.

Which 21-string instrument, made from half a gourd covered in cow skin, is traditionally played by Mandinka jalis?

The kora sounds much like a harp but is built like a lute, with its strings running in two ranks across a bridge that stands on the skin.

The medieval Ghana Empire lay not in modern Ghana but in western Mali and the south-east of which desert country?

Mauritania holds the ruins that many archaeologists take for the empire's capital, a stone-built town with a large mosque, though no inscription there proves it.

In the Ghana Empire, where the throne followed the mother's line, which relative of the king was his heir?

His sister's son took the throne, and each ruler bore the title ghana, meaning warrior or war chief, which outsiders came to use as the name of the whole country.

Which 16th-century warrior queen of the Hausa state of Zazzau is credited with ringing her cities in earthen walls?

Amina first made her name as a leading warrior in her brother's cavalry, and the old Hausa fortifications credited to her are still called Amina's walls.

In Hausa legend, the hero Bayajidda won the Queen of Daura's hand by killing which creature at the town well?

A snake named Sarki, the Hausa word for king, had let the people draw water only once a week. The hero's grandsons are said to have gone on to rule the Hausa states.

Which medieval world map by the Majorcan cartographer Cresques Abraham shows a king of Mali holding a gold object?

The Catalan Atlas labels the king the richest man in the region, a caption often stretched today into a claim about all of history.

Which people, who called their own state Wagadu, were the founders of the medieval Ghana Empire?

Soninke tradition traces the state to an ancestor named Dinga, and after its fall their traders scattered across West Africa.

Which ruined stone town on the Sahara's southern fringe is thought to have been the capital of the Ghana Empire?

Koumbi Saleh was found after a 17th-century chronicle, discovered in 1913, named the capital as Koumbi and led archaeologists to the ruins.

Which kingdom under the feared king Soumaoro Kanté was defeated at Kirina by the founder of the Mali Empire?

The Sosso began as vassals of the Ghana Empire before breaking away and conquering their former overlords, only to fall in turn at Kirina around 1235.

Which Granada-born diplomat visited the Songhai Empire before corsairs seized him and presented him to the Pope?

Leo Africanus took his new name from his patron, Pope Leo X, and is best known for his Description of Africa, published in 1550.

Which name did European traders give the shore between the Volta River and Lagos after its chief export?

The Slave Coast got its name in the 17th century to tell it apart from neighbouring shores known for other trades. Its ports included Ouidah and Badagry.