Mansa Musa was a wealthy man with much wealth to give. Gold and wealth for him could be a key to success or a key to disaster. Mansa Musa went on the trek through Africa to convert people to Islam and to establish trade partners. He wanted to show his wealth but also he was forced to almsgive. In other words he had to share his wealth.
Mansa Musa went on the trek through Africa for other motivating factors. He wanted to establish trade partners along the way and he knew he would be able to do that. Mansa Musa had 12,000 “slaves” who were actually his personal assistants. (Document A) Mansa Musa went on this trek to gather salt from salt mines. “ It has no trees, but is nothing but sand with a salt mine”.( Document C) Al-Umari was an Arab scholar
He decided to improve the status of his land on his arrival from a pilgrimage from Mecca in 1324. Furthermore, he transformed his trading city of Timbuktu to a center of learning and religion and built a mass, which set a new style of architecture in West Africa. “Caravans of Gold” underlines the importance of Timbuktu because it concentrated on African scholarship, politics, teaching theology, and Islamic law. Timbuktu was a significant place in Africa during this time because it became a market right after and made a profit for the region. Likewise, it was a religious, cultural, and profitable center whose people traveled north across the Sahara through Morocco and Algeria to other parts of Africa, Europe, and Asia. According to The History of Africa, “Because of his devotion to Islam, Mansa Musa strengthened Islam and promoted education, trade, and commerce in Mali” (Asante, 2014, pg. 135). It was a successful center for the trans-Saharan gold and salt trade and grew as the center of Islam. This statement launches the truth that Timbuktu supported Islamic values and knowledge because it was a city most well-known for the education of important scholars whose backgrounds were of Islam. Asante supports the fact that Mansa Musa was effective in reforming the city of Timbuktu and the trade in that area. Asante also states that “Musa did not forget the control of the gold and salt; it was fundamental for the
Imagine being the richest man in North Africa. Mansa Musa was not only this but a ruler and a very religious muslim. Mansa Musa was a very rich African emperor who walked all the way from his Kingdom of Mali to Cairo then eventually to Mecca with the goal to follow his religious guidelines of giving away 2.5 percent of his whole wealth and completing his holy pilgrimage.
While adding up all the gold mentioned in Document D, and adjusting the prices for inflation, the reader was left with the impression Mansa Musa had approximately $571,860,000 worth of gold with him in Cairo during his Hajj. After adding in all the other luxury goods Musa brought with him, another $247,080,000 is added to the amount of money he brought with him, ending with a total of $818,940,000. This is around $399,000,000,000 off from the original estimate. One could quite logically assume that Mansa Musa would not have brought his entire life savings with him to Cairo, but since he was a Muslim on Hajj, Mansa Musa most likely brought more than the average person to complete the third pillar of Islam; charity. Still, one billion dollars is very far off from 400
The earliest slaves were captives taken in warfare and most slaves appeared to have been the property of kings, priest, and temples, and only a relative small proportion were in private possession, which is not the case for transatlantic slave trade. The Arab trade of Zanj and Bantu slaves in Southeast Africa is one of the oldest slave trades, slaves were believed to be sold from the slave market of Zanzibar to the Somali coast. The Zanj who were taken as slaves to the Middle East were often used in strenuous agricultural work. As the plantation economy boomed and the Arabs became richer, agriculture and other manual labor work was thought to be demeaning. Male slaves were often employed as servants, soldiers, or laborers, while female slaves were long traded to the Middle Eastern countries and kingdoms by Arab and Oriental traders as concubines and servants. In terms of legal considerations, Bantu slaves were devalued. Somali social mores strongly discouraged, censured and looked down upon any kind of sexual contact with Bantu slaves. David Livingstone, a Scottish missionary explorer, wrote of the slave trade in the African Great Lakes region, which he visited in the mid-nineteenth
In the 1300s Mansa Musa, king of Mali took his holy pilgrimage to the city of Mecca as a devout muslim, traveling through scorching deserts and bustling cities, although there might be other reasons he took his religious Hajj. The pilgrimage of Mansa Musa traveled all across Northern Africa and Arabia, stopping in cities along the way where Mansa Musa gave out gold to all he saw. The journey from the Empire of Mali to the city of Mecca was not only a faithful religious journey to the holy city, but also to create a name for Mali as the wealthy and powerful empire it was.
The first leg of this trade was merchants from Europe bringing refined goods to Africa to trade for slaves. The merchants traded with chiefs and high authority leaders. The chiefs pretty much could and would trade whomever they
Finally, the Mali Empire succeeded in gaining and maintaining power through the influence of culture. One important way culture affects the power in the empire is, how Mansa Musa went on the pilgrimage. The pilgrimage is a very important piece in the culture, so when Mansa Musa decided to take the long trip, many were amazed and honored the empire even more (Sheet 3, Source 4). Seeing how culture was respected in the Mali empire, many people were inclined to visit the empire. Not only that, but the people already in the Mali Empire continued to support the empire, for they were able to live with their own culture without rules. Not only did Mansa Musa take the pilgrimage, he also gave numerous gifts of gold to people such as merchants along
an instrument to unite the Indian Muslims. He then emerged as a leader of Muslims and under
In 1441 a man by the name of Prince Henry the Navigator opened Europe’s age of exploring by providing a number of voyages down the West African coast. This opened up a new branch of people to explore a new part of the world that was known for being dangerous to reach because of the Saharan Desert. Many people went and explored in seeking gold and merchandise to sell back in there homesteads but instead some saw a new kind of trade, slave trade. Prince Henry's voyages saw many kinds of people such as Christopher Columbus’s first expedition and also to a man named Antam Goncalves a Spanish explorer, Goncalves’s voyage enslaved more than 230 Africans and he soon took them to a town of Lagos,Portugal. Many of Goncalves
Ibn Battuta had many experiences when making a voyage to Mali. During his travel a man accompanied Ibn and wrote down accounts of their journey. Battuta made his journey to Mali on February 1352 to December 1353. The accounts of the voyage that are written down are not all verbatim from Ibn Battuta. How well Ibn and his companion knew geography and how well the facts were will be shown. The reason why Battuta made this journey to Mali is explained. Ibn’s overall impression and understanding of certain aspects of life in western Sudan is examined.
Muhammad was the greatest man in the Middle East, he had not only started an empire in Arabia, but also founded the religion of Islam. In his legendary life, Muhammad started as a merchant, but later became the prophet of Allah, and spread teachings of the religion of Islam all over Arabia.
Muhammad's qualities facilitated him to be successful at the beginning to spread the word of God.
For the next 15 years, Livingstone was constantly moving into the African interior. He was strengthening his missionary determination he was also responding entirely to the delights of geographical discovery; he was building for himself a Christian, a courageous explorer, and a fervent antislavery advocate. As a missionary, David Livingstone quickly believed that what he was supposed to do is to not remain in one spot, preaching the gospel to the few local people willing to listen. Instead, he should keep on moving, reaching new groups and extending to them to be more familiar with what God wanted them to do with Christianity. Eventually he would expand this idea into a belief that his role was to open up Africa's interior to broader influences from Western civilization. Once that occurred, he would work hand in hand to end slave trading and uplift African peoples. Such motives drove Livingstone.
There are a lot of causes of the scramble for Africa, and one of them was to ‘liberate’ the slaves in Africa after the slave trade ended. The slave trade was a time during the age of colonization when the Europeans, American and African traded with each oth...
outside world. He often put ambition before family and his own personal health in his quest to open the interior of Africa to “Civilization, Christianity, and