The Man the World Forgot

1. 0:06In 1375, a Jewish cartographer in Majorca named Abraham Cresques drew the finest map of the known world. Six sheets of vellum, everything from the Atlantic Ocean to the coast of China.
2. 0:18Scholars, kings, and navigators studied it. It is still considered a masterpiece.
3. 0:23In the center of Africa, he drew a man on a throne.
4. 0:27Dark-skinned, crowned, holding a golden orb in one hand and a golden scepter in the other. Beside him, [music] the caption reads, "This black lord is called Musa Mali, lord of the Negroes of Guinea. So abundant is the gold found in
5. 0:43his country that he is the richest [music] and most noble king in all the land."
6. 0:48Europe knew about Mansa Musa. 50 years after the Hajj, his fame was so great that a European cartographer made him the most recognizable [music] figure on the African continent. And then, silence.
7. 1:03Within a century of that map, Portuguese sailors were rounding the West African coast, opening sea routes to Asia that made the trans-Saharan trade redundant.
8. 1:13The gold routes that had sustained Mali for generations withered, and the character of European contact [music] with West Africa changed from the gold trade to something far darker.
9. 1:24A framework emerged. [music] Africa as a source of labor, not a civilization of scholars. Africa without history. Africa without kings.
10. 1:35In the 19th century, Hegel wrote that Africa was no historical part of the world. This was not ignorance. The Catalan Atlas was sitting in Paris. The Arabic sources describing Mali's wealth and learning existed in libraries across
11. 1:50North Africa. The framework was constructed because it was useful. A man like Mansa Musa, sophisticated, literate, ruling a civilization stretching 2,000 miles was inconvenient for the story that colonialism needed to tell about the continent it was taking.
12. 2:07He was not forgotten. He was deprioritized, gradually, then completely.
13. 2:14The griots kept singing, but their words were oral, and oral traditions do not cross oceans in manuscript form. The Arabic [music] sources existed, but untranslated, inaccessible to the scholarship that was building the modern
14. 2:28picture of world history. The Timbuktu manuscripts sat in basement rooms and metal trunks and desert sand, waiting for scholars who had not yet been trained to look.
15. 2:39History is not only what happened. It is what gets recorded, translated, and circulated. On all three counts, [music] Mali was disadvantaged.
16. 2:50Then, slowly, things shifted.
17. 2:52Nehemia Levtzion's Ancient Ghana and Mali, published in 1973, was one of the first serious treatments in English.
18. 3:02The corpus of early Arabic sources for West African history in 1981 finally made the primary sources accessible to a wider audience. African scholars in Dakar, Bamako, Accra, and elsewhere began reclaiming histories that had been
19. 3:17ignored or filtered through colonial frameworks.
20. 3:21In 2012, Forbes included Mansa Musa at the top of history's wealthiest individuals. [music] The story spread through social media.
21. 3:29Millions of people who had never heard his name encountered him [music] in articles, videos, and eventually the video game Civilization VI. The scale of his wealth was astonishing, but what astonished people most was simpler than
22. 3:44that. They hadn't known he existed. He was not an exception in African history.
23. 3:49He was part of a long tradition. Aksum, Kush, Great Zimbabwe, Benin, sophisticated civilizations that existed before and alongside European expansion.
24. 4:00[music]
25. 4:01The question was never why Africa had no history. It did. The question is why so many of us were taught to believe it did not.
26. 4:09His story is powerful precisely because it does not fit the framework. It requires the framework to be replaced.
27. 4:17In [music] Mali today, griots still perform the lineages of the Keita dynasty, 700 years of living memory transmitted mouth to ear, generation to generation. The Ahmed [music] Baba Institute studies the manuscripts that survived. Scholars translate, [music]
28. 4:34filmmakers tell the story. Students in Bamako and London and Chicago encounter [music] him for the first time.
29. 4:41The gold of his hajj is long scattered, the empire is gone, the mosques still stand, the manuscripts survived.
30. 4:49He was born [music] into a dynasty built on the memory of Sundiata Keita. He built an empire stretching 2 million square miles. He crossed the continent to perform the hajj and rewrote the medieval world's understanding of wealth. He filled Timbuktu with
31. 5:04scholars. He commissioned mosques that are still standing. He left behind manuscripts that survived conquest, fire, and 500 years of silence.
32. 5:15He was [music] erased. He was remembered. He is being told again.
33. 5:20He was the richest man who [music] ever lived, but perhaps his greatest treasure was always the one that outlasted [music] the gold, the story itself.

Captions from YouTube. Automatic captions can mishear names and places.