Africa's Biggest Precolonial Empires: What's Verified, and What Just Sounds True

Two claims about precolonial Africa’s biggest empires circulate constantly, repeated across social media posts, listicles and even some otherwise careful summaries. The first is that the Songhai Empire, at its height, covered territory “comparable in size to the United States.” The second is that the Mali Empire, under Mansa Musa, was “the second-largest empire in the world,” trailing only the Mongols. Neither survives a check against the sources they claim to come from.

The Songhai comparison traces to a single sentence on a tertiary reference site, unattributed to any historian or study. On the actual numbers, the historian John Hunwick, translator of the main Songhai chronicle, puts the empire at about 1.4 million square kilometers, roughly the size of modern Mali. That is roughly six times smaller than the contiguous United States, and smaller estimates put it closer to ten times smaller. The Mali claim fares no better. The one systematic comparative dataset of historical empire sizes that produces the territorial figures repeated across most popular sources doesn’t rank either Mali or Songhai anywhere near the top thirty empires by land area; the Mongol Empire, the Yuan dynasty, the Golden Horde and several Chinese dynasties all dwarf them by a wide margin. Mansa Musa’s reputation as one of history’s wealthiest individuals rests on real, well-documented evidence, gold spending vivid enough to be recorded by contemporary Cairo chroniclers. That’s a genuinely strong claim. A territorial “second in the world” ranking is not, and conflating the two does both empires a disservice: it trades a defensible, specific fact for an inflated one that happens to sound more impressive.

This is not the only place popular history smooths a gap with something that sounds more complete than the evidence supports. The commonly repeated story that the Ghana Empire fell to an Almoravid conquest in 1076 turns out to be a myth that specialist historians have spent decades unwinding. In three articles in the journal History in Africa, by David Conrad and Humphrey Fisher in 1982 and 1983 and by Pekka Masonen and Fisher in 1996, they showed that no Arabic writer describes the conquest until the 15th century and that the story took its familiar form in Europe, above all in Maurice Delafosse’s work of 1912. The Soninke oral traditions of Wagadu blame drought, not invaders, for the kingdom’s fall. The 700,000-square-kilometer figure often given for the Mutapa Empire is treated with genuine skepticism by the same scholars who cite it, who note there’s no real consensus on the empire’s size. Even a number as specific-sounding as Mali’s “1.29 million square kilometers” doesn’t trace to one source; it’s an informal blend of two nearby figures that happen to circulate close together.

None of this means precolonial Africa’s empires need inflating to be worth writing about. Kanem-Bornu governed the Lake Chad basin in some form for roughly a thousand years, one of the longest continuous state traditions anywhere on the continent, a fact that needs no exaggeration to be remarkable. Ethiopia’s Solomonic dynasty ruled for 704 years and, at Adwa in 1896, delivered the only outright military defeat of a European colonial invasion by an African army during the Scramble for Africa. The Sokoto Caliphate governed more people than any other 19th-century West African state. Kongo negotiated with Portugal as an equal for a full century before that relationship broke down. Asante fought Britain to a standstill across five separate wars. Each of these is a specific, sourced, genuinely significant fact. This series covers eleven such empires, ranked here not strictly by contested land-area claims but by a mix of documented scale and lasting historical significance, with two entries, Mutapa and the Zulu Kingdom, run side by side rather than forced into a single slot, since the case for each rests on different and not directly comparable strengths, one on a disputed size, the other on outsized historical impact from a genuinely smaller state.

The eleven empires

1. The Songhai Empire: West Africa’s last great Sahelian power, until a smaller Moroccan force ended it at Tondibi.
2. The Mali Empire: Sunjata’s kingdom, Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage, and the long decline to 1599.
3. Ghana (Wagadu): the kingdom Arabic writers called the land of gold, and a fall that historians have substantially rewritten.
4. The Sokoto Caliphate: West Africa’s most populous 19th-century state, born from a single religious uprising.
5. Kanem-Bornu: roughly a thousand years of continuous statehood around Lake Chad.
6. The Aksumite Empire: named by a Persian prophet as one of the world’s four great kingdoms.
7. Solomonic Ethiopia: 704 years of one dynasty, from 1270 to the army’s deposition of Haile Selassie in 1974.
8. The Asante kingdom: a union of Akan states built around Kumasi and the Golden Stool, which killed a British governor in 1824 and stayed independent until 1901.
9. The Kingdom of Kongo: Afonso I’s letters, the Kongo church, and the long struggle with Portuguese Angola.
10. The Mutapa Empire: Great Zimbabwe’s successor, and a size claim its own historians dispute.
11. The Zulu Kingdom: the smallest empire on this list, and arguably the most famous.