Founders of the Empire

This is a continuation of my previous post incase you missed out about the Empire of Ghana read here.

Again basing their views on the evidence of Mahmud Kati, some modern historians maintain that the kingdom of Ghana owed it's origin and early growth to a group of white immigrants. Neither these historians nor Mahmud Kati himself explain the exact place of origin of these immigrants. It is likely, they say, these immigrants were Berbers or Jews immigrants in the northern Africa.

According to this theory, the 'white' immigrants established their rule over scattered Negro population in about the year A.D.300. As noted in my previous post, it is alleged that Ghana was ruled by forty four ruler before the kingdom came to be ruled by soninke Negro Kings.

The theory of the white rulers does not seem to have strong historical evidence in its support for the following reasons.

• Mahmud Kati himself lived through out the reign of Askia the great, and indeed accompanied the emperor on his great pilgrimage to mecca in 1495-7. Kati started writing the Tarikh al-Fattash in 1519 and died at the ripe age of 125 in 1593, two years after the fall of the Songhai empire to the Moroccan invaders. It has been suggested that in fact Kati only wrote part of the chronicles, the work being completed by his sons. Kati therefore wrote about the supposed white founders of the kingdom of Ghana four hundred years after the fall of that empire.

• Kati's aim was to write an account of his own native empire, Songhai, rather than that of Ghana. He himself sets out his aims in the following words. And because learning is rich in beauty, and fertile in its teaching ,since it instructs men about their father land, their ancestors, their history. Though these other things included an outline story of the Ghana empire, it is conceivable that he would not trouble to check the details in his reference to Ghana since this was not the main theme of his book.

Stay tuned for more history and historical moments.