Precolonial West African empires rivaled any world civilization in wealth and scholarship.

Evidence

Ghana, Mali, and Songhay developed empires that could rival in size, power, scholarship, and wealth any in the world. Intellectuals at universities in Timbuktu and Jenne pumped out scholarship and pumped in students from around West Africa. Songhay grew to be the largest. Mali may have been the most illustrious. The world’s greatest globe-trotter of the fourteenth century, who trotted from North Africa to Eastern Europe to Eastern Asia, decided to see Mali for himself in 1352. “There is complete security in their country,” Moroccan Ibn Battuta marveled in his travel notes. “Neither traveler nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers or men of violence.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 44

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s own writing on the Mali Empire in the Ibn Battuta immodesty article (‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’).