"From an examination of Omari's writings, which come from the same period and are based on Sudanese
accounts, it may be concluded that particularly agriculture and fruit-gathering, and also, in certain parts of the country, hunting and the rearing of livestock, assured the Mali peasants of a relatively prosperous and independent life, satisfying their needs without much contact with the outside world."
Arab travellers from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries all tell us that Mali towns Timbuktu, Gao and lesser places - were in general well supplied with victuals, and there is no doubt that the towns obtained some of their provisions by trade with the peasantry. The rural areas had a surplus of agricultural and animal products which was dispatched for sale in the towns. Ibn Batoutah and other sources indicate that the western Sudan even exported a certain amount of millet and rice to the Sahel regions, not only to Walata but also farther towards the districts where rock-salt and copper were exploited for import into the Sudan.
“Jaime Cortesao has drawn historians' attention to Portuguese sources of the early fifteenth century, according to which Portuguese gold currency was at that time based on importing from Morocco gold which must have come from the Sudan. The same author is of the opinion that it was above all in Sudanese gold that Morocco paid the import costs for European and Levantine goods brought by the Genoese and the Venetiansl2 a suggestion confirmed by several Italian documents. It should be added that Sudanese trade was not the only way in which Sudanese gold in large quantities reached Egypt and the
Near East. Sudanese pilgrims, who each year visited Egypt and the holy places of Islam in Arabia, brought with them very considerable quantities of gold to spend on the journey and on arrival in Cairo, Mecca and Medina.”
So without africans there is no money to fund Da Vinci's crazy experiments? Damn, man might have been set back another 1000 years.
