[_etyf]

The Mali Empire is particularly fascinating. Mansa Musa, who ruled that empire c. 1324, remains by some estimates the richest man who ever lived. His net worth is estimated by historians at around $400 billion USD. Elon Musk's net worth today is around $280 billion, for comparison.

Mansa Musa's wealth was built almost entirely by slaves, who were forced to mine gold and made up much of the Empire's military. Slavery in Mali continues to this day with an estimated 200,000 people held in direct servitude to a master [1]. Maybe that's why we don't hear so much about the Mali Empire, or the Ghana Empire for that matter. Personally I think it's history worth knowing, all the moreso if it shatters the myth that any one race is especially prone to the evil of slavery.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Mali

[prmph]

> The [Viking's] wealth was built almost entirely by violent plunder of other nations .... Maybe that's why we don't hear so much about the [Vikings]...

Oh wait, we continually hear about the glorious "exploits" of the Vikings.

[neartheplain]

You've misunderstood. Read the last sentence of my comment again, the bit after the comma.

[prmph]

Well, I showed that a statement you made is not supported by the evidence.

As for this supposed "Mansa Musa's wealth was built almost entirely by slaves", where's your evidence for that?

[neartheplain]

You ignored the explicit meaning of my comment, rewrote it to mean something entirely different, and now claim to have disproved that version of it. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

>As for this supposed "Mansa Musa's wealth was built almost entirely by slaves", where's your evidence for that?

Again I'll refer you to my original comment, specfically the "before colonization" section of the Slavery in Mali Wikipedia link. It cites various books and articles written and researched by professional historians.

[prmph]

You said the reason we don't hear about those West African empires is that their wealth was built on the back on slaves. I will provide a detailed rebuttal to this idea.

Firstly, it seems highly unlikely that the wealth of the West African empires was primarily from slave use and trading. This is an argument that is made by people who do not actually understand the region and its history. Even the eminent Henry Louis Gates makes a similar error in an article [1], where he says:

> the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold.

The Ashanti could not have been importing gold, since they were rather the source of much of the gold in the region. The wikipedia article on the Ashanti Empire [2] contains this statement:

> Before the Ashanti Kingdom had contact with Europeans, it had a flourishing trade with other African states due to the Ashanti gold wealth.

More generally, this is what [3] has to say about the economy of the west African empires with respect to gold:

> From the seventh to the eleventh century, trans-Saharan trade linked the Mediterranean economies that demanded gold—and could supply salt—to the sub-Saharan economies, where gold was abundant. ...Increased demand for gold in the North Islamic states, which sought the raw metal for minting, prompted scholarly attention to Mali and Ghana, the latter referred to as the “Land of Gold.” For instance, geographer al-Bakri described the eleventh-century court at Kumbi Saleh, where he saw gold-embroidered caps, golden saddles, shields and swords mounted with gold, and dogs’ collars adorned with gold and silver. The Soninke managed to keep the source of their gold (the Bambuk mines, most notably) secret from Muslim traders. Yet gold production and trade were important activities that undoubtedly mobilized hundreds of thousands of African people. Leaders of the ancient kingdom of Ghana accumulated wealth by keeping the core of pure metal, leaving the unworked native gold to be marketed by their people.

Since the gold was mined locally, it could not have been bought with the proceeds of slave trading. And since it was an activity of the people (not just the nobility) it is unlikely that vast numbers of people were forced to mine it as slaves. And gold was much more likely to bring in a lot of income than slave trading. Clearly, the source of Mansa Musa's great wealth was gold. This is attested to by the story of gold losing its value in Egypt because he gave so much of it away during his pilgrimage to mecca.

So I don't know where you get this idea that the wealth of the west African empires was primarily based on slave trading.

Secondly, even if slave trading was widespread, other empires and nations have done worse, and we still hear about their exploits. We hear about the supposed heroism of the Vikings and Columbus and his cohort all the time, even though they committed many, atrocities, including exterminations and genocides.

So your thesis fails on both counts.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashanti_Empire

3. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/gold/hd_gold.htm

[neartheplain]

This is the third time you have misunderstood and misrepresented my thesis. I will not respond to a fourth time.

>You said the reason we don't hear about those West African empires is that their wealth was built on the back on slaves.

Here is the sentence from my original comment which I asked you to re-read:

>Personally I think it's history worth knowing, all the moreso if it shatters the myth that any one race is especially prone to the evil of slavery.

To be painstakingly clear, we don't hear much about the Mali Empire in popular discourse because their wealth was built on the back of slaves, AND the slaveholders were black. In the USA where I live, a dominant political framing device is that white people are responsible for slavery, period. The existence of rich black African empires built on slavery and conquest challenges this narrative. Therefore these empires, despite the examples they provide of black Africans building powerful, complex, and influential civilizations, are not frequently mentioned.

>Since the gold was mined locally, it could not have been bought with the proceeds of slave trading.

It was mostly mined by slaves. See sources cited in that article I asked you to read. I said Mansa Musa's wealth was "built almost entirely by slaves", not "by slave trading." You're confusing your words for my own and responding to things I never said.

>And since it was an activity of the people (not just the nobility) it is unlikely that vast numbers of people were forced to mine it as slaves.

I see we're at the part where you just make stuff up. Here is what actual historians say; from "African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa" [0] by Michael A. Gomez [1], a recent and excellent history of the Mali Empire:

>Mali as a critical source of servile labor is overshadowed in the immediacy of the eighth/fourteenth century by its mineral resources, so much so that the extensive nature of slavery in Mali is not readily grasped. But from every indication, slavery was entrenched and ubiquitous, hidden in plain sight.

>While estimates of the enslaved accompanying the mansā vary, all agree there were thousands upon thousands, with several reports particularly taken with the high number of females, perhaps as many as fourteen thousand. Given their vulnerability to sexual exploitation, they may have been viewed by Egyptians as a veritable harem in motion, a misogynistic moveable feast, the largest ever witnessed.

>As for soldiers, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa reports the mansā was always accompanied by 300 armed slaves, while al-‘Umarī distinguishes between these 300 and the thirty mamlūks or “Turks and others” brought from Egypt.

>The enslaved served in other capacities, working in the salt mines of Taghaza and, as Ibn Baṭṭūṭa records, both enslaved men and women (al-‘abīd wa-‘l-khadam) performed the arduous work of mining copper at Takedda (and maybe “Zkry”).

>Yet another task assigned to the enslaved, male and female, was transporting commodities. As previously cited, Ibn Khaldūn mentions the Malians “use only slave women and men for transport but for distant journeys such as the Pilgrimage they have mounts,” a convention confirmed by Valentim Fernandes, who wrote that “each [Jula] merchant has with him 100 or 200 black slaves or more, to carry the salt on their heads from Jenne to the gold mines, and to return from there with gold.

>This mostly qualitative evidence indicates slavery was rapidly evolving in the region, and while a more thorough analysis awaits the recovery of greater detail with the emergence of imperial Songhay, what can be stated here is that these differentiated servile deployments—from domestics to soldiers, and from office holders to their exploitation in mining and possibly agriculture—represent, in the aggregate, something distinct from earlier epochs in Ghana and Gao. There is a noticeable increase in their numbers as well as the variety of their occupations under Mali, further suggesting such expansion was part and parcel of the imperial project in West Africa, and predicated on such myriad mobilization.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/African-Dominion-History-Empire-Medie...

[1] https://csaad.nyu.edu/people/michael-a-gomez/