Mansa Musa and Islam in Africa: Crash Course World History #16

Key Takeaways

hi my name is John Green this is crash course world history and today we're gonna talk about Africa it's a great mystery we've already talked about Africa Egypt is in Africa you haven't shut up about it the entire course yeah that's true me from the past but I forget big it's like super big much bigger than it appears on most maps actually I mean you can fit India and China and the United States if you just fold in Maine all of that fits in Africa like any huge place Africa is incredibly diverse and it's a mistake to focus just on Egypt so today let's go here south of the Sahara Desert [Music] first let's turn to written records oh right we don't have very many at least not written by sub-saharan Africans much of African history was preserved by a oral rather than written tradition these days we tend to think of writing is the most accurate and reliable form of description but then again we do live in a print-based culture and we've already said that writing is one of the markers of civilization implying that people who don't use writing aren't civilized a prejudice that has been applied over and over again to Africa but one if you need evidence that it's possible to produce amazing literary artifacts without the benefit of writing let me direct your attention to the Iliad in the Odyssey which were composed and memorized by poets for centuries before anyone ever wrote them down and to no less an authority than Plato said that writing destroys human memory by alleviating the need to remember anything and 3 you think oral tradition is uncivilized but here you are listening to me talk but we do have a lot of interesting records for some African histories including the legendary tale of montsum Musa by legendary I mean some of it probably isn't true but it sure is important let's go to the thought-bubble so there was this King Monson Musa who ruled the West African Empire of Mali and in 1320 for ish he left his home and made the Hajj the pilgrimage to Mecca he brought with him an entourage of over a thousand people some sources say 60,000 and most importantly 100 camel loads of gold I wish it had been donkeys so I could say he had 100's loads of gold but no camels right so along the way Monsen Musa spent freely and gave away lots of his riches most famously when he reached Alexandria at the time one of the most cultured cities in the world he spent so much gold that he caused runaway inflation throughout the city that took years to recover from evil houses in Cairo and in Mecca to houses attendance and as he traveled through the world a lot of people notably the merchants of Venice no thought bubble like actual merchants of Venice right they saw him in Alexandria and returned to Italy with tales of Monson Lucis ridiculous wealth which helped create the myth in the minds of Europeans that West Africa was a land of gold an Eldorado the kind of place you'd like to visit and maybe you know in five centuries or so begin to pillage thanks so what's so important about the story of Monsen Musa well first it tells us that there were African kingdoms ruled by fabulously wealthy African kings which undermines one of the many stereotypes about Africa that its people were poor lived in tribes ruled by Chiefs and witch doctors also since Monson Musa was making the Hajj we know that he was a Muslim and be relatively devout and this tells us that Africa or at least Western Africa was much more connected to the parts of the world we've been talking about than we generally are led to believe matzah Musa knew all about the places he was going before he got there and after his visits the rest of the Mediterranean world was sure interested in finding out more about his homeland Mansa Musa's pilgrimage also brings up a lot of questions about West Africa namely what did his kingdom look like and how did he come to convert to Islam the first questions a little easier so we'll start with that one the Empire of Mali which montsum Musa ruled until the extremely elite year of 1337 was a large swath of West Africa running from the coast hundreds of miles into the interior and including many significant cities the largest and best-known of which was Timbuktu the story of the Islamization of the Empire however is a bit more complicated okay so pastoral North Africans called Berbers had long traded with West Africans with the Berbers offering salt in exchange for West African gold that may seem like a bad deal until you consider that without salt we die whereas without gold we only have to face the universe's depraved indifference to us without the benefit of metallic adornment I went to an ominous place pretty quickly right so anyway the Berbers were early converts to islam and islam spread along those pre-existing trade routes between north and west africa so the first conference in mali were traders who benefited from having a religious as well as a commercial connection to their trading partners in the north and the rest of the Mediterranean and then the Kings followed the traders maybe because sharing the religion of more established kingdoms in the north and the East would give them prestige not to mention access to scholars and administrators who could help them cement their power so Islam became the religion of the elites in West Africa which meant that Muslim kings were trying to extend their power over largely non-muslim populations which worshipped traditional African gods and spirits in order not to seem to foreign these African Muslim Kings would often blend traditional religion with Islam like for instance giving women more equality than was seen in Islam's birthplace anyway the first kings we have a record of adopting Islam were from Ghana which was probably the first Empire in West Africa and it really took off around the 11th century as with all empires and also everything else Ghana rose and then fell and was replaced by Mali and the kings of Mali especially Mansa Musa but also Monza's Suleiman his six sesor tried to increase the knowledge and practice of Islam in their territory so for example when Monson Musa returned from his Hajj he brought back scholars and architects to build mosques and the reason we know a lot about Mali is because it was visited by even Battuta the Moroccan cleric and scholar who kind of had the best life ever he was particularly fascinated by gender roles in the Malian Empire and by malian women writing they are extremely beautiful and more important than the men oh it must be time for the open letter an open letter to even Battuta I wonder what's in the secret compartment today oh there's me some kind of fake beard movie magic Stan why did you do this to me dear even Battuta bro I love Twitter and my xbox and Hawaiian pizza but if I had to go into the past and live anyone's life it would be yours because you were this outlandish ly learnin scholar who managed to parlay your knowledge of Islam into the greatest road trip in history he went from Mali to Constantinople to India to Russia to Indonesia you were probably the most well-traveled person before the invention of the steam engine and everywhere you went you were treated like a king and then you went home and you wrote a really famous book called the real on that people still read today and also you could grow a real beard and I'm jealous best wishes John Green one more thing about Monsun Musa there are lots of stories that Monta Musa attempted to engage in maritime trade across the Atlantic Ocean and some historians even believed that millions reached the America siene investigation may one day prove it but until then we'll only have oral tradition the Malayan Empire eventually fell to Songhai which was itself eventually overthrown for being insufficiently Islamic all of which is to say that like China or India or Europe West Africa had its own empires that relied upon religion and war and incredibly boring dynastic politics man I hate dynastic politics if I wanted to live in an ostensibly independent country that can let go of monarchy I'd be like thought-bubble and moved to Canada oh that's not fair shut up and take back Celine Dion all right now let's moved to the other side of Africa where there was an alternative model of civilizational development to the eastern coast of Africa saw the rise of what historians call Swahili civilization which was not an empire or a kingdom but a collection of city-states like Zanzibar and Mombasa and Mogadishu all of which formed a network of trade ports there was no central authority each of these cities was autonomously ruled usually although not all by a king but there were three things that linked the city-state such that we consider them a common culture language trade and religion to Swahili language is part of a language group called Bantu and its original speakers were from West Africa their migration to East Africa changed not only the linguistic traditions of Africa but everything else because they brought with them iron work and agriculture until then most the people living in the East had been hunter-gatherers or herders but once introduced agriculture took hold as it almost always does unless wait for it you're the Mongols modern-day Swahili by the way is still a Bantu based language although it's been heavily influenced by Arabic on that topic for a long time historians believe that these East African cities were all started by Arab or Persian traders which was basically just racist they didn't believe that Africans were sophisticated enough to found these great cities now scholars recognized that all the major Swahili cities were founded well before Islam arrived in the region and that in fact trade had been going on since the first century CE II but Swahili civilization didn't begin its rapid development until the eighth century when Arab traders arrived seeking goods that they could trade on the vast Indian Ocean network the Silk Road of the sea and of course those merchants brought Islam with them which just like in West Africa was adopted by the elites who wanted religious as well as commercial connections to the rest of the Mediterranean world in many of the Swahili states these Muslim communities started out quite small but at their height between the 13th and 16th century most of the cities boasted large mosques the one in Kilwa even impressed even Battuta who of course visited the city because he was having the best life ever most of the goods exported were raw materials like ivory and animal hides and timber it's worth noting by the way that when you're moving trees around you have a level of sophistication to your trade that goes way beyond the Silk Road I mean if you'll recall they were just trading like tortoise shells and stuff not again Africans also exported slaves along the east coast although not in huge numbers and they exported gold and they imported luxury goods like porcelain and books in fact archaeological digs in Kilwa have revealed that houses often feature two kind of built-in bookshelf learning of books through architecture nicely captures the magic of studying history archaeology writing and oral tradition all intermingle to give us glimpses of the past and each of those lenses may show us the past as if through some funhouse mirror but if we're conscious about it we can at least recognize the tortion studying Africa reminds us that we need to look at lots of sources and lots of kinds of sources if we want to get a fuller picture of the past if we relied only on written sources it would be far too easy to fall into the old trap of seeing Africa as backwards and uncivilized through approaching it with multiple lenses we discover a complicated diverse place that was sometimes rich and sometimes not and when you look at it that way it becomes not separate from but part of our history thanks for watching I'll see you next week crash course is produced and directed by Stan Muller our script supervisor is Danica Johnson the show is written by my high school history teacher Raoul Meyer and myself and our graphics team is thought bubble last week's phrase of the week was animal crackers if you want to suggest future phrases of the week or guess at this one you can do so in comments also if you have questions about today's video ask them and our team of historians will endeavor to answer thanks for watching and supporting crash course and as we say in my hometown don't forget to be awesome