The Long Way Back to Ourselves

5.6

Africa Before Colonialism

This episode surveys West African, East African, and southern African polities before European colonial rule and asks why so few can be named offhand. You learn of the Egyptian official al-Umari's account of Mansa Musa's 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca, whose gold spending reportedly depressed the metal's value in Cairo for years afterward. It traces the West African gold-salt trade through Ibn Battuta's account of the salt-mining town of Taghaza and describes Timbuktu's manuscript market, where accounts claim more money could be made in books than other goods. Its central case is Great Zimbabwe, whose African origin was established by archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson in the 1920s but officially suppressed by Rhodesia's white-minority government into the 1970s.