Mali: Timbuktu, the Griot Tradition and the Empire That Shook the Medieval World
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Mansa Musa, emperor of Mali from 1312 to 1337, made a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 accompanied by an entourage of 60,000 people and carrying so much gold that when he spent lavishly in Cairo the price of gold in Egypt did not recover for a decade. The Mali Empire at its height controlled more gold and salt trade than any other entity in the world. Timbuktu — the city that the pilgrimage route passed through and that the empire enriched — became one of the most important centres of Islamic scholarship in the medieval world, home to the Sankore University and hundreds of thousands of manuscripts.
The Timbuktu manuscripts — estimated at 700,000 to 1,000,000 documents covering theology, astronomy, mathematics, history, and law — represent one of the great intellectual archives of the pre-modern world. Most were written in Arabic; many in local languages using Arabic script. When extremists threatened them in 2012 during a period of conflict, Malians smuggled hundreds of thousands of manuscripts to Bamako in a rescue operation conducted with extraordinary courage. Many survive. The archive is being digitised.
The griot tradition — the hereditary lineage of musician-historians who carry the oral history of Mande peoples — is most fully developed in Mali. The kora, a 21-string instrument combining features of the lute and harp, is the griots' primary instrument, and its music — melodically complex, rhythmically sophisticated — is one of the most beautiful musical traditions in the world. Toumani Diabaté, from a family of griots going back 71 generations, brought kora music to global audiences. The music carries everything the manuscripts contain, in a different form.
