#blackkingdoms

“Our merchants stood up in his presence and, even though they were close to him, he spoke to them through a third person. This was a mark of the little consideration he had for them and I was so unhappy at this that I regretted bitterly having come to a country whose inhabitants display such bad manners and give evidence of such contempt for white men.”

-Ibn Battuta

- The latter (farba) addresses a crowd only through a herald; this was how the farba must have acted at his own court in Ualata.

“The Maghreban sultan even had prepared a selection of the finest products of his realm and entrusted to Ali Ibn-Ghanem, Emir of the Makil, the task of transporting this truly royal gift to the sultan of the Blacks. A deputation made up of the highest-ranking individuals in the empire accompanied Ibn-Ghanem.”

-Khaldun

“Meanwhile, Gao had recovered its independence between the death of Congo (Kankan) Mussa and the accession of Suleiman Mansa, and approximately one century later, the Mandingo Empire began to decline under the attacks of Songhai, while preserving enough power and prestige so that its sovereign could meet on an equal footing with the King of Portugal, then at the height of his glory.”

- Delafosse

“Blacks who went about totally naked, got married without dowries, and were prolific goat- and camelherds with tattooed faces, lived to the West of Mali. The other, more highly developed inhabitants of Ghana went slavehunting in this region, which must have covered part of Lower Guinea and the southern part of present-day Senegal.”

-Idrisi

“Among this people, customs and rules demand that the successor to the king be his sister’s son: for, they say, the sovereign can be sure that his nephew is indeed his sister’s son; but nothing can assure him that the son he considers his own in actuality is.”

“They (the Blacks) are named for their maternal uncles, and not after their fathers; it is not the sons who inherit from their fathers, but the nephews, the sons of the father’s sister. I have never met with this last custom anywhere else, except among the infidels of Malabar in India.” -Ibn Batuta

“At the time of the conquest of Northern Africa (by the Muslims), some merchants penetrated into the western part of the land of the Blacks and found among them no king more powerful than the king of Ghana. His states extended westward to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Ghana, the capital of this strong, populous nation, was made up of two towns separated by the Niger River, and formed one of the greatest and best populated cities of the world. The author of the Book of Roger (Al Bakri) makes special mention of it, as does the author of Roads and Kingdoms.“