@Thabo
Stop trolling and making crat up. Either post cite some sources that support your claims or bounce out of this thread.
I can tell that that you're trolling because funny enough you're trying to base people in this thread who have an interest for Ancient Egypt. You tell them to focus on West African history like you are the ambassador of what African-Americans can study. When members on this thread say they have an interest in Mali and Timbuktu you not only further base them for their interest and but try to claim Mali and Timbuktu was some black hating states that mostly enslaved black people. Also ignoring the fact that AA's have a good amount of Mandinka ancestry, the same Mandinkas who founded the Mali Empire.
But that's not the point. The point is your lying. Yes, Timbuktu was founded by Tuareg Berbers, by then it was just a small trading post in the desert. It was later conquered and mostly controlled by Mandinka people. The Timbuktu that we know today was created by Mandinka people. The rich libraries, universities and architecture.
But you trying to say that Timbuktu is not apart of "black Mali", but Azawad is even more idiotic and hilarious. What the hell is a "black Mali." How can anyone take you serious after that?
Azawad was a SHORT-LIVED rebel state in Northern Mali by Tuaregs. Back then there was never an Azawad. During both Mali and Songhai Timbuktu was always controlled by "black Malis" lol, since they had a foot in the government, education, politics and trade. Tuaregs barely had any influence beyond nomadic traders and personal armies for the Western Sudanic kings. The people of Timbuktu was described mostly as BLACK by scholars and travelers like Ibn Battuta.
So what the hell are you getting at?
And the Mali Empire was not "Arab based." Are you silly? The only thing they adopted by Arabs were the religion and writing system. Popular to common belief, The Mali empire was majority indigenous beliefs if I remember correctly. It was mainly the elites who were Muslim, even still Islamic beliefs in Mali were mixed with traditional African beliefs and the King did not force people to convert to Islam.
The religion of Islam was an important part of the Mali Empire. However, even though the kings, or Mansas, had converted to Islam, they did not force their subjects to convert. Many people practiced a version of Islam that combined Islamic beliefs with the local traditions.
Read more at:
Ancient Africa for Kids: Empire of Ancient Mali
Hell heres Ibn Battuta explaining how liberal Mali's Islam was compared to Islam of Arabs and other Muslims. For example women did NOT have to wear veils and had a lot of say.
The Massufa were devout Muslims who said their prayers, learned the law, and memorized the Qu'ran. But their women were "not modest in the presence of men" and did not wear a veil. Although people married, "but the women do not travel with the husband, and if one of them wanted to do that, she would be prevented by her family." Each was free to take other sexual partners from outside the "prohibited degrees of marriage" [father, brother, son, etc.]. "One of them would enter his house to find his wife with her companion and would not disapprove of that conduct."
Ibn Battuta in West Africa
But it gets worse with you... You're claim that Mansa Musa was an Arabized black man who enslaved his people is your biggest lie yet. Yes, Mansa Musa was a devout Muslim, but he cared for his people and invested A LOT into his empire, but I'll get to that later.
First off, most of the slaves in the Mali Empire and in Timbuktu were prisoners of war or slaves that were imported like some Turkish slaves.
"Ibn Bhutta, who lived in West Africa for some years during the Mid-14th century, reported that the Mansa of Mali had an elite bodyguard of 300 slave recruited soldiers. These Mamluks are believed to have included Turks and other Northerners, perhaps even some Europeans"....
From Historical Atlas of the Islamic World, by David Nicolle
"It is interesting to note the great demand of the Mali people for Turkish, Ethiopian, and other slave-girls, and also for eunuchs and Turkish boys. The slave trade thus went in both directions."
-
The Cambridge history of Africa: From c. 1600 to c. 1790, pp 90
In the 1300's al~Umari wrote that behind the mansa of Mali's throne
"stand some thirty Turkish [Mamluk] or other mercenaries, purchased for him in Cairo. One of them holds a silk parasol in his hand, surmounted by a cupola and a gold bird representing a sparrow hawk." Translation by D.T. Niane.
Yeah these people all the way from Cairo, Europe, Ethiopia and Turkey are SOOOOOOO Mansa Musa's people.
Lets not even get into the fact that Mali's economy wasn't even based on slavery like say Kanem, but gold and salt, since around that time Mali controlled 2/3 of the worlds gold supply. But getting to more important facts. During Mansa Musa's dsays no black slaves were even linked to the Trans Sahara Slave trade.
"
Except for the Zandj (black slaves) from lower Iraq, no large body of blacks historically linked to the trans-Saharan slave trade existed anywhere in the Arab world ... The high costs of slaves, because of the risks inherent in the desert crossing, which would have not permitted such a massive exodus ... In this connection, it is significant that in the Arabic iconography of the period, the slave merchant was often depicted as a man with a hole in his purse. Until the Crusades the Muslim world drew its slaves from two main sources: Eastern and Central Europe (Slavs) and Turkestan. The Sudan only came third. " -
Africa from the Seventh to Eleventh Century, UNESCO, 1988
So lose us with the lying BS. Mansa Musa was a king that was noted for caring for his people and kingdom. And the people actually saw themselves as superior to non-Sudanese(black people), but thats not an important part. The important thing was that Mansa Musa not only cared for his people, but invested in his people and his kingdom.
It was in religion and culture, however, that Mūsā may have had his greatest impact. He actively encouraged the spread of Islam and the development of Islamic institutions. His efforts included a campaign for the construction of mosques throughout his domain. Among the intellectuals who accompanied Mūsā back to Mali after his pilgrimage was Abū Ishāq al-Sahili, possibly the most outstanding architect of medieval Islam. His varied talents included not only architecture and city planning but also poetry and music, and they indicate the richness of Islamic culture with which Mūsā seeded his kingdom. Abū Ishāq perfected techniques of mosque construction using West African materials, including the difficult task of building minarets out of mud brick. Some of his mosques still stand in the cities of modern Mali.
Mūsā also encouraged the development of systematic study and education. At the Sankore mosque in the fabled city of Timbuktu, near the northernmost part of the Niger's course, theologians, geographers, mathematicians, historians, and scientists gathered into a community that continued to publish until well into the eighteenth century. Just as Christian thinkers collected around cathedrals and thus began the European university tradition, Muslim intellectuals congregated around mosques, and Sankore was one of the best. Its fame spread as far as Egypt and Morocco.Professors summoned to teach in Timbuktu from some of the intellectual hotbeds of Islam often became the students of the Timbuktu scholars rather than their instructors.
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When Mansa ("king of kings") Musa came to power (1312 AD),
Mali already had firm control of the trade routes to the southern lands of gold and the northern lands of salt. Now Musa brought the lands of the Middle Niger under Mali's rule. He enclosed the cities of
Timbuktu and
Gao within his empire. He imposed his rule on trans-desert trading towns such as
Walata. He pushed his armies northward as far as the important salt-producing place called
Taghaza, on the northern side of the great desert. He sent them eastward beyond Gao to the borders of
Hausaland. He sent them westward into
Takrur.
So it came about that Musa enclosed a large part of the Western Sudan within a single system of law and order. He did this so successfully that the Moroccan writer Ibn Batuta, travelling through Mali about twelve years after Musa's death, found 'complete and general safety in the land'. This was a big political success, and made Mansa Musa one of the greatest statesmen in the history of Africa.
Like the Mali kings before him, Musa was a Muslim. But most of his people were not Muslims, so he supported the religion of the Mandinka people as well as Islam. Different religious customs and ceremonies were allowed at his court.
West Africa Before the Colonial Era: A History to 1850
WOW...What a self-hating Arabized c00n allowing indigenous
black religions in his court.
But its cute how Islamic African kingdoms/states automatically get assumed with enslaving their own people and being solely based on slavery, yet coastal non-Islamic West African states who's economies were solely based on slavery never does.
From the 1640s, four inland states near the
Gulf of Guinea were growing in wealth and power from the slave trade. The kingdom of
Oyo, around 300 kilometers (190 miles) inland, was the most successful of these kingdoms. It benefited from terrain sufficiently unforested and free of the tsetse fly and other disease carrying insects to allow for the breeding of horses. The Oyo kingdom used cavalry effectively in expanding southward where savanna split coastal forest. Oyo forced the coastal kingdom of Allada to pay it tribute, and it gained direct access to trade with Europeans.
Oyo was a slave state, and its king used slave labor on his vast farmlands. In wars,
Oyo took more slaves than it needed for the royal farms, and it traded them to the Europeans for guns, cloth, metal goods and cowry shells. It traded also with Africans to its north for horses and for more captives for the slave trade. And the kingdom acquired wealth by taxing trade that crossed its territory to and from Hausaland.
Another power in the region was the kingdom of Abomey, which was founded in the early 1600s by the brother of the king of Allada,
a coastal kingdom that had grown wealthy from the slave trade. The brother, Do-Aklin, cut off village chiefs from having any say in selecting his successor. Rule in Abomey passed to his grandson, Wegbaja, who consolidated his power – while both Allada and Abomey were paying tribute to the more powerful kingdom of Oyo. In Abomey human sacrifices were used to honor the king's ancestors – the sacrifices usually captives from warfare.
West of Abomey were the Ashanti (Asanti), who were dominated by the Denkera to their southwest, to whom the Ashanti paid tribute. The primary political unit among the Ashanti had been the village, governed by clan elders. In the 1660s, an Ashanti warrior named Osei Tutu grouped clan chiefs around him and formed an alliance with the leading Ashanti religious figure, Anokye. They created a golden stool, representing power and spiritual unity, on which the ruler of the Ashanti was to sit, and they sanctified the golden stool with sacrifices.
Osei Tutu and Anokye extended their power across Ashanti chiefdoms, unifying the Ashanti. And with the power that accrued from this unity, the Ashanti defeated the Denkera and absorbed some of their subject states.
These victories gave the Ashanti contact with the Europeans, to whom they sold slaves. And the Ashanti began an expansion inland for more slaves and for gold.
Meanwhile, Oyo cavalry invaded the Abomey four times, but Abomey retained enough power to expand against Allada on the coast. The king of Abomey, Agaja, was interested in buying arms from the Europeans. Conquering Allada in the 1720s gave him access to European trading. Th
e enlarged rule of Agaja became known as Dahomey, and it began to prosper from the sale of slaves to the Europeans.
Slavery and the Kingdoms of Oyo, Dahomey and Asante
Should AAs too ignore these West African states? Funny you didn't mention them on your little troll jihad on Islamic West African states.
Why the heck should AAs or ANYONE for that matter listen to you on African history when you yourself don't have a clue on African history...