African Kingdoms

Old Ghana / Ghana Empire / Soninke Empire of Wagadou (Africa)
c.AD 300 / 750 - 1237

West African States All Modern States All African States Early Africa (Intro) Egypt

The pre-colonial history of Africa is often hard to pin down in great detail. Largely this was due to events remaining unchronicled by natives outside of an oral history. Only encounters with outsiders produced written records, although modern archaeology is making efforts the improve the story of Africa's more ancient states. Those states can be placed in an Iron Age which fits in between the continent's late-forming Neolithic and its pre-colonial slave trade period.

Emerging from prehistoric beginnings, one of West Africa's greatest pre-colonial states was the empire of Old Ghana. The native name for this state was Wagadou, as the phrase 'ghana' simply means 'king', from an earlier meaning of 'warrior'. Even so, that name, 'Ghana' is the one by which the empire is generally known.

The empire of Ghana supposedly emerged following incursions by Berber tribes which caused the collapse of the previous social organisation, the Dhar Tichitt culture which was at its height by about 1600 BC but which was beginning to abandon sites by 300 BC due to encroachment by the Sahara.

Whether the people of this culture played any part in the foundation of Old Ghana is unclear, although they would certainly have provided some influence. The possible inwards migration of other groups such as the Akan has also been claimed as the founding force behind the empire, but the Akan are assumed to have begun to arrive in the modern Ghana region towards the very end of the empire, not at its beginnings.

According to tradition, the empire had forty-four white (Berber) rulers from the fourth century onwards, but nothing is known of them or how their kingdom was organised. In the eighth century the Soninke (or Solinke) people of the Mande group migrated from the east into the West African region, between the southern edge of the Sahara and the cradle of the Senegal and Niger rivers.

(Information by Peter Kessler, with additional information from Darfur: The Long Road to Disaster, J Millard Burr & Robert O Collins (Markus Wiener, 2006), from Tarikh al-fattash (a West African chronicle which was written in Arabic in the second half of the seventeenth century but which used earlier material), from Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Sadi's Tarikh al-Sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents, John O Hunwick (Brill, 2003), from Encyclopaedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition, Cambridge (England), 1910), from The New Atlas of African History, G S P Freeman-Grenville (Israel, 1991), from The Times Atlas of World History, Geoffrey Barraclough (Ed, Hammond Inc, 1979), and US News & World Report (16-23 August 1999), and from External Links: The Story of Africa (BBC World Service), and Background to D T Niane's 'Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali', (translated by G D Pickett, Harlow, England, Longman, 1965 & 1982, background prepared by Jim Jones, West Chester University of Pennsylvania (around 2003), and Ancient History Encyclopaedia.)

AD 300s

The first of 44 'white' (Berber) rulers of Old Ghana.

c.350

The traditional theory regarding the fall of Kush (otherwise known as Nepata or Meroë) is that the kingdom is destroyed during an invasion by Ezana of the Ethiopian kingdom of Axum.

The ruins of ancient Meroë lie in Upper Nubia, now within Sudan - in its day it was a wealthy metropolis which stretched along the east bank of the Nile

To contradict this, the Ethiopian account seems to describe the quelling of a rebellion in lands they already control. It also refers only to the Nuba, and makes no mention of the rulers of Meroë. However, no details of rulers of Kush are known after this date, making their survival unlikely.

There is a possibility that the kings, or at least something of the royal family, move to Pachoras and re-found the kingdom as Nobatia. In addition the Akan people who have - according to tradition - migrated into the region from West Africa are claimed to migrate westwards again upon the fall of Kush.

Eventually they form small tribal states in what is now Ghana, and possibly even within the empire of Old Ghana itself, although no firm dating is available. If the latter possibility is correct then Kaya Maja, shown below, could be a prominent Akan leader at this time in the Akwar area of what later becomes Sudan.

This Nubian burial mound of a Nobatian king was discovered at Ballana, Lower Nubia, during excavations that were carried out in the 1930s, in the late phase of perhaps the most glamorous period of early archaeological discovery in North Africa

fl c.350

Ruler of small Akan settlements in the Akwar area.

fl c.380s?

Name unknown. Tribal leader during Akan migration?

c.350 - c.622

The Tarikh al-fattash claims a total of twenty-one kings rule Old Ghana in succession although their names are not known (with that number including the samples shown above and below). If Kaya Maja is indeed a tribal leader in the Sudan region then his successors would likely be tribal leaders during the long migration into Old Ghana.

It will take them around four hundred years to found (or re-found) the state of Old Ghana (if indeed it is the Akan people who are responsible for this).

Evidence shows that, following the introduction of the camel into West Africa in the third century, gold is being exported from there prior to the Islamic invasion of Africa in the seventh century. Despite the great imperial Old Ghana state perhaps not yet being in existence, those exports probably originate from the same area, and are enjoyed by the Roman empire to the north.

The Ballana burial mound discovered by archaeologists in lower Nubia in the 1930s contained the body of a Nubian king complete with his crown, one arm reaching outwards with a bracelet still on that arm

fl c.622

Name unknown. Tribal leader during Akan migration?

c.622 - c.750

Oral history and Arabic records claim a further twenty-one kings rule in succession in this period but once again their names are unknown. Tradition describes Old Ghana as being founded in the early eighth century by a man named Dinga.

He is ascribed an origin in the east - supposed to mean Aswan in Egypt - and is claimed as leaving many children behind him as he migrates across the western Sudan. Upon his death his two sons, Khine and Dyabe, contest the kingship, and Dyabe is victorious.

fl c.750

'Son of Dinga'. Soninke ghana. Refounded the kingdom?

c.750 - c.1040

Another period of 'lost' history exists here for the empire as oral history fails to remember the names of several more kings, let alone their deeds. The Arabic writer, al-Ya'qubi, working in 889-890, describes a core Old Ghanaian state which governs a wide spread of sub-kings such as those who are named Sama and 'Am.

A typical Old Ghana empire-period village is shown here, part of an early medieval state which arose in uncertain circumstances following a period of tribal migration and regional unrest

990

Old Ghana has conquered Audaghost, at the north-western edge of the empire, by this stage in its existence. Details of the event are not available. Some way to the east the state of Igodomigodo is now a thriving kingdom.

1040 - 1062

Soninke ghana. Refused to convert to Islam.

1062 - 1068

Nephew. Soninke ghana. Refused to convert to Islam.

1062 - 1076

Fourteen years of war against the fanatical Almorivids ends with the capture and burning of the capital at Kumbi Saleh. The Almoravids are unable to hold onto their prize though, and the much-weakened Old Ghanaians retake it.

The Mandinka of Kangaba take the opportunity to break away from Old Ghanaian rule, while the weakening of Old Ghana seems to be a major trigger for the migration (or increased migration) into the region of the Akan people of the Sahel.

One group of Malinke, the Kangaba, founded the great empire of Mali with a dynasty which continued virtually uninterrupted for thirteen centuries, well after the empire fell

1068 - 1076

Name or names unknown.

1076 - c.1090

First of the Sosso ghana.

c.1090 - 1100

Sosso. Relationship unknown.

1100 - 1230

Old Ghana ceases to be a commercial or military power after 1100, at least partially due to new trade routes being opened to its east which robs it of most of its trade in gold and salt.

For a brief period, until about 1230, the rabidly anti-Muslim Sosso people control a kingdom which makes up the southern portions of the Old Ghanaian empire (and briefly the Kangaba state too), but the Almorivid revolution effectively halts the growth of kingdoms and empires in the Sahel for almost a century.

The ruins of Koumbi Saleh have been excavated in modern times but, although the city was clearly at its height during the period in which Old Ghana reached its greatest extent, it cannot categorically be confirmed as the site of the empire's capital

c.1100 - 1120

Sosso. Relationship unknown.

c.1120 - 1130

Sosso. Relationship unknown.

c.1130 - 1140

Sosso. Relationship unknown.

c.1140 - 1160

Sosso. Relationship unknown.

c.1160 - 1180

Sosso. Relationship unknown.

by 1200

Old Ghana has become so weakened that it is dominated by the Sosso people, possibly during the reign of Diara Kante (below). He rebels against their control and forms a loose confederation of Mande-speaking states which possibly also includes its former subject state at Kangaba.

c.1180 - 1200

Temporarily a vassal of the Sosso people.

c.1200 - 1234

Sosso king, with Soumaba Cisse as his vassal.

1234 - 1237

Ally of Sundiata of Mali. Old Ghana subsumed within Mali.

1237 - 1480

The kingdom effectively falls to Mali in 1237 (sometimes given as 1240 and probably less of a fall and more of an absorption). Akan people are now migrating freely into former Old Ghana territory, if they had not already been doing so since about 700, as are Ga people from Benin and beyond.

Akan people - photographed here around the beginning of the twentieth century - migrated into regions of modern Ghana from around the eleventh century AD, but probably in smaller family groups rather than as a single mass movement of people

The trading state of Bonoman (otherwise known as Bono Manso or Brong-Ahafo) which has been created by the Abron people forms a medieval Akan kingdom which gives birth to several small Akan states.

It is located in the modern Brong-Ahafo region of modern Ghana and eastern Ivory Coast, in a large chunk of central western Ghana which crosses the modern border. Those small Akan states which are created following the rise of Bonoman start with Twifo-Heman in the fifteenth century.