19 - From Elders to Kings

Summary

MANY PEOPLES BY THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY HAD DEVELOPED forms of rule that were personalised in die leaders of dominant descentlines : these ritual and political leaders had titles, such as mansa, mat, oba or ntemi which meant much the same as Europeans of the same period understood by emperor or kaiser, king or feonig, roi or re. Some of them had few subjects and small power, being little more than 'chairmen’ of councils composed of descent-line spokesmen in a cluster of villages. Others stood at the head of large systems, even of vast systems: although not autocrats, these great kings were rulers of wide prestige, and some of them acquired an intercontinental fame.

Living at the court of the emperor of Mali in 1352, the Moroccan scholar Ibn Battuta found Mansa Suleyman ‘a miserly king, not a man from whom one might hope for a rich present’. In his memoirs of a few years later he recalled having expected the mansa's hospitality gift to be ‘robes of honour and money’; but when it was brought to the house where he was staying with the chief judge of Mali, ‘Lo! it was three cakes of bread, and a piece of beef fried in native oil, and a calabash of sour curds.’

His disappointment will have been all the sharper because the kings of the Western Sudan were renowned for their generosity in gifts. Only a few years earlier the Mali mansa, while travelling through Cairo on pilgrimage to Mecca, had undermined the price of the Egyptian dinar by the quantity of gold that he and his following had thrown upon the market. It was Mali gold that fuelled the trade of half the civilised world, and was now providing the metal for Europe's first gold currencies since Roman times. Enthroned beneath a wide umbrella topped with the golden figure of a bird, the emperor was said to rule over a kingdom ‘four months’ travel in length and as much again in breadth'. A king like that, one might reasonably think, could do better than cakes of bread and a calabash of curds.

Ibn Battuta was better pleased with the pomp and brilliance of the mansa's court and ceremonial.