Mali empire

1. A huge territorial empire that flourished in west Africa during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Its capital was Timbuktu, which became a center of Islamic learning (see Islam). The empire controlled trade routes that stretched from the edge of the Sahara in the north to forests in the south and that carried gold and other luxuries.

Example Sentences

Epic narratives, still circulating today, were passed down, including the “Sunjata,” a core poem of African oral literature that recounts the life of Mansa Musa’s ancestor Sundiata Keita, who founded the Mali empire.

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The settlement stayed small, the ceramics got much simpler, and the culture changed to more closely resemble that of the nearby Mali Empire.

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I’m thinking, for example, of Samory Touré, who became the Mali empire’s leader in the late 19th century, and who killed his own daughters because they flirted with a palace page.

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Keita grew up here, during the last years of French colonial rule – Mali became independent in 1960 – as one of 12 children in a family directly descended from the warrior king Sundiata Keita, the 13th-century founder of the Mali empire.

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He traced his ancestry to the rulers of Kaabu, a successor state of the Mali Empire, although by the time he was born that empire had given way to years of British colonial rule.

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