Pre-Imperial Mali

Pre-Imperial Mali

There are a few sketchy references to pre-Imperial Mali in written sources. The oldest reference comes from al-Bakri's account of the Western Sudan written in 1068. In this section, he names two countries "Daw" and "Malal" located near the Niger and close to gold-fields, which are likely to be the core of the eventual Empire of Mali. Al-Bakri goes on to describe how the unnamed ruler of the kingdom was converted to Islam by a merchant when he witnessed the miraculous shower of rain that ended a drought. This event occurred at least one generation preceding 1068, since al-Bakri noted that the ruler's descendants and his nobles kept Islam, even though the common people were not converted. Ibn Khaldun, a North African historian living in Egypt interviewed shaykh Uthman, who was the faqih of Ghana and described as wide and learned. Uthman provided information on the past kings, presumably from oral tradition current in his day (1394), and named the first Muslim king Barmandana. In al-Idrisi's account of 1154, he noted that the two towns of Daw and Malal had four days' travel between them, located in a river valley that joins the Nile (by which he meant the Niger). Malal was described as a "small town, like a large village without a surrounding wall, built on an unassailable hill of red earth."