Afrym
Heritage & History

The Ghana Empire: Wagadu, Land of Gold

Long before the modern country took its name, a Soninke kingdom called Wagadu controlled the gold trade of the western Sahel. Arab writers called it Ghana. Here is what we know, and what remains legend.

By Amos Hope Jnr · · 4 min read

When the Gold Coast won its independence in 1957, its leaders chose a new name with a long memory: Ghana. They were not naming the country after a place on its own soil. They were reaching back roughly a thousand years, and hundreds of kilometres to the north-west, to a great kingdom of the Sahel whose wealth in gold had amazed travellers from North Africa and the Middle East. Its people called it Wagadu. Arab writers knew it as Ghana, a word that was originally a title of its king.

Where and when

The Ghana Empire lay in the Sahel, the semi-arid belt on the southern edge of the Sahara, in what is now south-eastern Mauritania and western Mali. It was founded by the Soninke people, speakers of a Mande language who still live in the region today.

Its origins are uncertain. Some traditions and early writers suggest it was already established by the 4th to 8th centuries CE. By the time Arab geographers began writing about it in the 8th and 9th centuries, it was already famous as "the land of gold". It reached its height around the 10th and 11th centuries, and declined in the 12th and 13th centuries.

The gold trade

Ghana's power rested on trade, especially trade in gold. The empire itself did not hold the main gold fields, which lay further south at Bambuk and Bure, near the upper Senegal and Niger rivers. Instead, Ghana sat in the perfect position between the gold-producing south and the trans-Saharan caravan routes to the north.

Caravans of camels crossed the desert from North Africa, bringing salt, cloth, copper, horses and other goods. In the markets of Ghana, these were exchanged for gold, ivory and other products from the south. The king controlled the trade and taxed it. According to the geographer al-Bakri, writing in Córdoba in 1068 from the reports of merchants, the king claimed every gold nugget found in the country, leaving only gold dust to the people, so that gold would not become too plentiful and lose its value.

The capital: twin towns

Al-Bakri also described the capital. It was made up of two towns, about ten kilometres apart:

  • One was the town of the Muslim merchants, with twelve mosques, imams, scholars and stone houses.
  • The other was the king's town, with the royal palace, domed buildings and sacred groves where priests tended the shrines of the traditional religion and where the kings were buried.

The king was not a Muslim, but he employed Muslims as ministers and interpreters, and he welcomed foreign traders. Al-Bakri described the king's court in vivid detail: he sat in a domed pavilion surrounded by horses covered in gold cloth, by pages with gold-mounted swords and by dogs wearing collars of gold and silver.

Archaeologists have excavated a large site at Koumbi Saleh in Mauritania, with stone houses, a mosque and cemeteries, and many believe it to be the merchants' town of the capital. The king's town has not been identified with certainty.

The legend of Bida

The Soninke have their own account of Wagadu's rise and fall, preserved by oral tradition and griots, the hereditary storytellers and musicians described in our story on the kora and griots. In one widely told version, the prosperity of Wagadu depended on Bida, a great serpent who lived in a well. Every year, the people offered Bida the most beautiful young woman of the land, and in return the serpent caused showers of gold to fall.

One year, the chosen woman was Sia Yatabéré, whose fiancé, Mamadi Sefe Dekote, could not bear to lose her. He cut off the serpent's head. As it died, Bida cursed the land: drought struck, the gold vanished, and the people of Wagadu were scattered across West Africa.

This is a legend, not a historical record. Historians often see in it an echo of real events: the drying climate of the Sahel, the decline of the gold trade, and the dispersal of the Soninke, whose descendants now live across Mali, Senegal, Mauritania, Gambia and beyond.

Decline and the Almoravid debate

How did the Ghana Empire decline? For a long time, historians said it was conquered in 1076 by the Almoravids, a Berber Muslim reform movement from the western Sahara. This view relied on later Arabic sources.

More recent scholars have questioned that story. Some argue there was no violent conquest at all, and that the relationship between Ghana and the Almoravids may have involved alliance, conversion and trade as much as war. What is clearer is that by the 12th century Ghana's rulers had converted to Islam, that the empire was weakened by competition, changing trade routes and environmental pressures, and that its former provinces broke away.

After Ghana

In the 13th century, the region came under the control of a new and even larger power: the Mali Empire, founded by Sundiata Keita. Mali took over the gold trade and became famous under rulers such as Mansa Musa, whose story we told in our article on Mansa Musa. Later still came the Songhai Empire. Ghana was the first of these great Sahelian states.

Why it matters

The Ghana Empire shows that West Africa was home to complex, wealthy states long before European contact, connected by trade to North Africa, the Mediterranean and the Islamic world. Its story combines eyewitness accounts, archaeology and oral legend, each telling a different part of the truth. And its name lives on, chosen in 1957 to give a newly independent African nation a link to a glorious past.

Further reading

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