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- This is the third time you have misunderstood and misrepresented my thesis. I will not respond to a fourth time.
>You said the reason we don't hear about those West African empires is that their wealth was built on the back on slaves.
Here is the sentence from my original comment which I asked you to re-read:
>Personally I think it's history worth knowing, all the moreso if it shatters the myth that any one race is especially prone to the evil of slavery.
To be painstakingly clear, we don't hear much about the Mali Empire in popular discourse because their wealth was built on the back of slaves, AND the slaveholders were black. In the USA where I live, a dominant political framing device is that white people are responsible for slavery, period. The existence of rich black African empires built on slavery and conquest challenges this narrative. Therefore these empires, despite the examples they provide of black Africans building powerful, complex, and influential civilizations, are not frequently mentioned.
>Since the gold was mined locally, it could not have been bought with the proceeds of slave trading.
It was mostly mined by slaves. See sources cited in that article I asked you to read. I said Mansa Musa's wealth was "built almost entirely by slaves", not "by slave trading." You're confusing your words for my own and responding to things I never said.
>And since it was an activity of the people (not just the nobility) it is unlikely that vast numbers of people were forced to mine it as slaves.
I see we're at the part where you just make stuff up. Here is what actual historians say; from "African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa" [0] by Michael A. Gomez [1], a recent and excellent history of the Mali Empire:
>Mali as a critical source of servile labor is overshadowed in the immediacy of the eighth/fourteenth century by its mineral resources, so much so that the extensive nature of slavery in Mali is not readily grasped. But from every indication, slavery was entrenched and ubiquitous, hidden in plain sight.
>While estimates of the enslaved accompanying the mansā vary, all agree there were thousands upon thousands, with several reports particularly taken with the high number of females, perhaps as many as fourteen thousand. Given their vulnerability to sexual exploitation, they may have been viewed by Egyptians as a veritable harem in motion, a misogynistic moveable feast, the largest ever witnessed.
>As for soldiers, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa reports the mansā was always accompanied by 300 armed slaves, while al-‘Umarī distinguishes between these 300 and the thirty mamlūks or “Turks and others” brought from Egypt.
>The enslaved served in other capacities, working in the salt mines of Taghaza and, as Ibn Baṭṭūṭa records, both enslaved men and women (al-‘abīd wa-‘l-khadam) performed the arduous work of mining copper at Takedda (and maybe “Zkry”).
>Yet another task assigned to the enslaved, male and female, was transporting commodities. As previously cited, Ibn Khaldūn mentions the Malians “use only slave women and men for transport but for distant journeys such as the Pilgrimage they have mounts,” a convention confirmed by Valentim Fernandes, who wrote that “each [Jula] merchant has with him 100 or 200 black slaves or more, to carry the salt on their heads from Jenne to the gold mines, and to return from there with gold.
>This mostly qualitative evidence indicates slavery was rapidly evolving in the region, and while a more thorough analysis awaits the recovery of greater detail with the emergence of imperial Songhay, what can be stated here is that these differentiated servile deployments—from domestics to soldiers, and from office holders to their exploitation in mining and possibly agriculture—represent, in the aggregate, something distinct from earlier epochs in Ghana and Gao. There is a noticeable increase in their numbers as well as the variety of their occupations under Mali, further suggesting such expansion was part and parcel of the imperial project in West Africa, and predicated on such myriad mobilization.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/African-Dominion-History-Empire-Medie...
- The wikipedia page about the Mali Empire [1] has a few books in the Further Reading section. This one looks promising: African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_Empire
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34928286-african-dominio...
