The Ancient Empire of Ghana, and Why It Isn't the Modern Country

The Ghana of the Middle Ages lay far from the modern republic. The republic is a coastal nation on the Gulf of Guinea, between Côte d’Ivoire and Togo. The medieval kingdom stood in the western Sahel, on the desert edge between the Senegal and Niger rivers, in what is now southeastern Mauritania and western Mali. The Gold Coast took the older kingdom’s name when it declared independence in 1957, as the historian François-Xavier Fauvelle notes, and that story is told in From Gold Coast to Ghana: The 1957 Independence and the Name Nkrumah Chose.

The name itself was never a place name. “Ghana is a title given to their kings,” the Andalusian geographer al-Bakri wrote in 1068; “the name of the region is Awkar.” Arabic writers then used the word for the king’s city and for his realm. Soninke oral tradition remembers a kingdom called Wagadu, which the historian Nehemia Levtzion judged very likely to be the same state.

Al-Bakri never went there. He wrote in Cordoba from the reports of merchants. The king in 1068 was Tunka Manin, who had come to the throne in 1063. The capital, al-Bakri was told, was two towns on a plain six miles apart: a Muslim town with 12 mosques and a royal town beside sacred groves where the kings were buried. The king kept his ancestral religion, but most of his ministers were Muslims.

Ghana’s wealth came from trade, not from mines of its own. The gold came from fields to the south, and the king took tolls: one golden dinar on each donkey-load of salt coming into the country, two on each load going out, five mithqals on a load of copper and ten on a load of other goods. He also reserved every gold nugget for himself and left the dust to his people. Al-Bakri reported that the king could put 200,000 men into the field, more than 40,000 of them archers; the historian Michael Gomez notes that this may describe a force raised in an emergency rather than a standing army.

Where exactly the capital stood is still disputed. The ruins at Koumbi Saleh, in southeastern Mauritania, are the leading candidate. Their excavator, Sophie Berthier, found occupation from about the ninth century to the early 15th and judged the identification strengthened for that span, while the archaeologist Timothy Insoll holds that the royal capital itself has not been found.

For much of the 20th century, histories said Ghana fell to an Almoravid conquest in 1076. Historians David Conrad and Humphrey Fisher showed in 1982 and 1983 that no Arabic writer describes that conquest until the 15th century, and that the story took its familiar form in Europe, above all in Maurice Delafosse’s work of 1912. Ghana was still there long afterward. In about 1336 the Cairo writer al-Umari listed it as a province of Mali whose ruler was the only one of the mansa’s subjects still called king.

The full history, with its sources, is on our page on Ghana, the Kingdom of Wagadu.