Ghana, first of the great medieval trading empires of western Africa (fl. 7th–13th century). It was situated between the Sahara and the headwaters of the Sénégal and Niger rivers, in an area that now comprises southeastern Mauritania and part of Mali. Ghana was populated by Soninke clans of Mande-speaking people who acted as intermediaries between the Arab and Amazigh (Berber) salt traders to the north and the producers of gold and ivory to the south. (The empire should not be confused with the modern Republic of Ghana.)
An unconfirmed tradition dates the origins of the kingdom to the 4th century ce. Nothing is known of the political history of Ghana under its early kings. The first written references to the empire are those of Arabic geographers and historians from the 8th century, and it seems certain that, by 800, Ghana had become rich and powerful. Called Wagadu by its rulers, it derived its more familiar name from the king’s title of ghāna. The king was able to enforce obedience from lesser groups and to exact tribute from them. Much of the empire was ruled through tributary princes who were probably the traditional chiefs of these subject clans. The Ghanaian king also imposed an import-export tax on traders and a production tax on gold, which was the country’s most valuable commodity.
According to the 11th-century Spanish-Arab chronicler Abū ʿUbayd al-Bakrī, the king welcomed to his capital many of the northern African traders of the Sahara, who, after the Arab conquest in the 8th century, had been converted to Islam. In the course of Ghana’s history the capital was moved from one place to another: that of the 11th century has been tentatively identified by archaeologists as Kumbi (or Koumbi Saleh), 200 miles (322 km) north of modern Bamako, Mali.
The principal raison d’etre of the empire was the desire to control the trade in alluvial gold, which had led the nomadic Amazigh peoples of the desert to develop the western trans-Saharan caravan road. Gold was secured, often by mute barter, at the southern limits of the empire and was conveyed to the empire’s capital, where a Muslim commercial town developed alongside the native city. There the gold was exchanged for commodities, the most important of which was salt, that had been transported southward by northern African caravans.
As Ghana grew richer it extended its political control, strengthening its position as an entrepôt by absorbing lesser states. It also incorporated some of the gold-producing lands to its south and such south-Saharan cities to the north as Audaghost, a famous market that has since disappeared.
Ghana began to decline in the 11th century with the emergence of the Muslim Almoravids, a militant confederation of the Ṣanhājah and other Amazigh groups of the Sahara who combined in a holy war to convert their neighbours. Abū Bakr, the leader of this movement’s southern wing, took Audaghost in 1054 and, after many battles, seized Kumbi in 1076. The Almoravids’ domination of Ghana lasted only a few years, but their activities upset the trade on which the empire depended, and the introduction of their flocks into an arid agricultural terrain initiated a disastrous process of desertification. The subject peoples of the empire began to break away, and in 1203, one of these, the Susu, occupied the capital. In 1240 the city was destroyed by the Mande emperor Sundiata, and what was left of the empire of Ghana was incorporated into his new empire of Mali.