Malinke people
Malinke, a West African people enwrapping corridor of Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal, The Gambia, and Guinea- Bissau. They speak a Mandekan language of the Mande branch of the Niger- Congo family.
The Malinke are divided into multitudinous independent groups dominated by a heritable nobility, a point that distinguishes them from utmost of their further egalitarian neighbours. One group, the Kangaba, has one of the world’s most ancient dynasties; its rule has been nearly continued for 13 centuries. Beginning in the 7th century announcement as the centre of a small state, Kangaba came the capital of the great Malinke conglomerate known as Mali(q.v.). This was the most important and most famed of all the conglomerates of the western Sudan, now monumentalized in the name of the Republic of Mali.
The contemporary Malinke are an agrarian people, cultivating similar masses as millet and sludge and tending small herds of cattle, kept primarily for trade, bridegroom– price payments, and prestige. Houses are generally spherical, with thatched straw roofs, and are frequently grouped in substantial figures and girdled by a precipice. Descent, heritage, and race are patrilineal. Since about the 12th century they’ve substantially been Muslim.
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Guinea region, Africa
Guinea, the timber and littoral areas of western Africa between the tropic of Cancer and the ambit. deduced from the Berber word aguinaw, or gnawa, meaning “ black man ”( hence akal n- iguinamen, or “ land of the black men ”), the term was first espoused by the Portuguese and, in forms similar as Guinuia, Ginya, Gheneoa, and Ghinea, appears on European charts from the 14th century onward.
There’s a distinction between Upper and Lower Guinea, which lie westward and southward, independently, of the line of stormy peaks that runs northeast from Annobón( formerly Pagalu) Island through São Tomé to Mount Cameroon. The Gulf of Guinea is a part of the Atlantic Ocean conterminous to this littoral area. Sections of the seacoast of Guinea were known by their principal products, similar as the Grain Coast( from Cape Mesurado to Cape Palmas, along present– day littoral Liberia), so called because it was the source of the “ grains of paradise ”( Guinea pepper, Xylopia aethiopica); the Ivory Coast( beyond Cape Palmas and now substantially in Côte d’Ivoire), the Gold Coast( east of Cape Three Points, along present– day Ghana), and the Slave Coast( between the Volta River and the Niger River delta, along present– day Togo, Benin, and Nigeria).
Cape Bojador( latitude 26 ° N) was rounded by the Portuguese shipman Gil Eanes( Gilianes) in 1434, and some times latterly the first loadings of slaves and gold were brought back to Lisbon. A papal bull gave Portugal exclusive rights over the western seacoast of Africa, and in 1469 Fernão Gomes was granted a trade monopoly, with the provision that 300 long hauls( 480 km) of new seacoast be explored annually. The ambit was reached in 1471 and the Congo River reached by Diogo Cão in 1482. After 1530 other Europeans, including English, Dutch, French, Danish, and Brandenburgers, established trading posts or castles in the area.
European penetration of Guinea was hindered by several factors the hot, sticky, and unhealthy climate; the viscosity of the rain timber; the failure of harbours along the generally suds– bound seacoast; and the difficulties of swash navigation.
Mūsā I of Mali emperor of Mali
Mūsā I of Mali,( failed1332/37?), mansa( emperor) of the West African conglomerate of Mali from 1307( or 1312). Mansa Mūsā left a realm notable for its extent and riches — he erected the Great Mosque at Timbuktu but he’s stylish flashed back in the Middle East and Europe for the splendour of his passage to Mecca( 1324).
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Passage to Mecca
Mansa Mūsā, either the grandson or the grandnephew of Sundiata, the author of his dynasty, came to the throne in 1307. In the 17th time of his reign( 1324), he set out on his notorious passage to Mecca. It was this passage that awakened the world to the miraculous wealth of Mali. Cairo and Mecca entered this royal name, whose spangling procession, in the superlatives employed by Arab historians, nearly put Africa’s sun to shame. Traveling from his capital of Niani on the upper Niger River to Walata( Oualâta, Mauritania) and on to Tuat( now in Algeria) before making his way to Cairo, Mansa Mūsā was accompanied by an emotional caravan conforming of 60,000 men including a particular train of 12,000 enslaved persons, all sheathe in brocade and Persian silk. The emperor himself rode on horseback and was directly anteceded by 500 enslaved persons, each carrying a gold- adorned staff. In addition, Mansa Mūsā had a baggage train of 80 camels, each carrying 300 pounds of gold.
Mansa Mūsā’s fabulous liberality and piety, as well as the fine clothes and exemplary geste of his followers, didn’t fail to produce a most-favourable print. The Cairo that Mansa Mūsā visited was ruled by one of the topmost of the Mamlūk sultans, Al- Malik al- Nāṣir. The Black emperor’s great civility notwithstanding, the meeting between the two autocrats might have ended in a serious politic incident, for so absorbed was Mansa Mūsā in his religious observances that he was only with difficulty converted to pay a formal visit to the sultan. The annalist al- ʿUmarī, who visited Cairo 12 times after the emperor’s visit, set up the occupants of this megacity, with a population estimated at one million, still singing the praises of Mansa Mūsā. So lavish was the emperor in his spending that he swamped the Cairo request with gold, thereby causing such a decline in its value that the request some 12 times latterly had still not completely recovered.
Autocrats of West African countries had made pilgrimages to Mecca before Mansa Mūsā, but the effect of his flamboyant trip was to announce both Mali and Mansa Mūsā well beyond the African mainland and to stimulate a desire among the Muslim fiefdoms of North Africa, and among numerous of European nations as well, to reach the source of this inconceivable wealth.
