Abd al-‘aziz al-Bakri on West Africa

edited excerpt from pp. 78 - 87 of J.F.P. Hopkins, tr., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)

Ghana and the Customs of its Inhabitants

The City of Ghana consists of two towns situated on a plain. One of these towns , which is inhabited by Muslims, is large and posses twelve mosques, in which they assemble for the Fridav praver. There are salaried imams and muezzins (callers to prayer), as well as jurists and scholars. In the environs are wells with sweet water, from which they drink and with which they grow vegetables. The king's town is six miles distant front this one and bears the name of Al-Ghaba. Between these two towns there are continuous habitations. The houses of the inhabitants are of stone and acacia) wood. The king has a palace and a number of domed dwellings all surrounded with an enclosure like a city wall. In the king's town, and not far from his court of justice, is a mosque where the Muslims who arrive at his court pray. Around the king's town are domed buildings and groves and thickets where the sorcerers of these people, men in charge of the religious cult, live. In them too are their idols and the tombs of their kings. These woods are guarded and none may enter them and know what is there. In them also are the king's prisons. If somebody is imprisoned there no news of hi is ever heard. The king's interpreters, the official in charge of his treasury and the majority of his ministers are Muslims...

They make sacrifices to their dead and make offerings of intoxicating drink.

On every donkey-load of salt when it is brought into the country their king levies (taxes) one gold dinar, and two dinars (a unit of metal currency) when it is sent out. From a load of copper the king's due is five mithqals (a unit of metal of currency), and from a load of other goods ten mithqals. The best gold found in his lands comes from the town of Ghiyaru, which is eighteen days' distant from the king's town over a country inhabited by tribes of the Sudan whose dwellings are continuous.

The nuggets found in all the mines of his country are reserved for the king, only the gold dust being left for the people. But for this the people would accumulate gold until it lost its value...

The king of Ghana, when he calls up his army, can put 200,000 men into the field, more than 40,000 of them archers. The horses in Ghana are very small...The inhabitants sow their crops twice yearly, the first time in the moist earth during the season of the Nil flood, and later in the Earth [that has preserved its humidity]...

Among the provinces of Ghana is a region called Sama, the inhabitants of which are known as al-Bukm. From that region to Ghana is four days' traveling. The people there go naked; only the woman cover their sexual parts with strips of leather which they plait. They leave the hair on the pubis and only shave their heads. Abu'Abd Allah al-Makki related that he saw one of these women stop in front of an Arab, who had a long beard, and say something that he could not understand. He asked the interpreter about the meaning of her words. He replied that she wished that she had hair like that of his beard on her pubis. The Arab filled with anger, called down curses upon her...

From Bughrat you go to Tiraqqa and from there across the desert plain to Tadmakka, which of all the towns of the world is the one that resembles Mecca the most. Its name means "the Mecca-like". It is a large town amidst mountains and ravines and is better built than Ghana or Kawkaw. The inhabitants of Tadmakka are Muslim Berbers who veil themselves as the Berbers of the desert do. They live on meat and milk as well as on grain which the earth produces without being tilled. Sorghum and other grains are imported for them from the land of the Sudan. They wear clothes of cotton, muli, and other robes dyed red. Their kings wears a red till ban, yellow shirt, and blue trousers. Their dinars (metal currency) are called "bald" because they are of pure gold without any stamp. Their women are of perfect beauty, unequalled among people of any other country, but adultery is allowed among them. They fall upon any merchant [disputing as to] which of them shall take him to her house....