A Glorious Age in Africa: Ghana, Mali, and Songhay, The Story of Three Great Empires by Daniel Chu, Elliott Skinner (review)

Daniel Chu, author of several books of history, and the late Columbia University Anthropology Distinguished Professor Elliott Skinner, as coauthors, have contributed immensely to information on Africa and its ancient empires with the publication of A Glorious Age in Africa: Ghana, Mali, and Songhay, The Story of Three Great Empires. Apart from the introduction (pp. 1–12), three short but pungent chapters discuss the ancient empires of Ghana (chapter one), Mali (chapter two), and Songhay (chapter three), coupled with a conclusion (pp. 114–118) and an index (pp. 119–120).

The coauthors begin with an introduction that includes a discussion of a historical event: the sudden appearance of Rene Caillie, a French national, who in 1828 confirmed for the official French representative in Morocco that he had found the hitherto fabled city of Timbuktu. The information was useful because the city was reputed to have been a center of education, research, and traditional medical wonders. To Europeans, as the coauthors point out, Timbuktu was believed to be “a place of unbelievable riches—a place of gold, gold, and more gold” (p. 1).

In spite of the depiction of West Africa–based Timbuktu in rich or affluent terms, whatever the Europeans knew about the continent was from Arab sources, and these Europeans still considered Africa a dark continent, a forbidden place, full of mystery. According to the coauthors, the first European to find Timbuktu and return to report firsthand information about the circumjacent interior of Africa was to receive 10,000 French francs from the Geographical Society of Paris. That was a valuable prize in the early nineteenth century. Therefore, in 1827, Caillie “left Senegal on the west coast of Africa to find Timbuktu” (pp. 1–2). His arrival in Timbuktu in April 1828 became a worldwide sensation. Caillie recorded that it had taken him fifty-eight days in a 2812-mile journey to find the place. In the words of the coauthors, the sensation that his achievement engendered attracted commendation and honors from worldwide royalty, and he was rewarded with prizes and pensions: “His achievement caused the same sort of excitement that a modern astronaut causes on return from a journey in outer space” (pp. 2–3).

Readers will learn from this book that the people of ancient Africa could be divided into two stocks, Negroid and non-Negroid. They will further learn that the non-Negroid people were known as Berbers, who are believed to have been the first people to have settled in the Mediterranean coastal region. The authors spell out that Berbers and Tuaregs of the Sahara Desert often came in contact with Negro (now black) nomads who ventured into the great desert, though the center of Negro society was south of the Sahara (pp. 6–7).

This was, indeed, the era of invasions. Northwest Africa was then known to the Arabs as the Maghreb, and from there, Arabs were reportedly joined by Berber converts to Islam for an invasion of Christian Europe. However, Arab forces had “less success in trying to conquer the land of the Sudanese Negroes south of the Sahara” (p. 11). In fact, west of Sudan had some of the most famous and highly respected educational and research institutions in the Muslim world, which included Timbuktu, Jenne, and Gao, cities that contributed to the growth of Islamic scholarship and science. Western Sudan, where they were situated, saw the rise of ancient kingdoms that grew into empires: Ghana, Mali, and Songhay (p. 12).

The Empire of Ghana is discussed as a land of gold, headed by an emperor-like royal family member called a king by the coauthors. This was when there was an evolution of the notion of tribal or ethnic groups. Among the early tribal people, the Soninke used ancient weapons because of their iron-making abilities, the origin...