Best Books on African Empires and Kingdoms

The idea that Africa had no history before European colonisation is not just wrong. It is one of the most damaging myths in the entire story of how history has been written. Africa produced some of the wealthiest, most sophisticated, and most administratively complex states in the premodern world. Their relative absence from standard history curricula says more about who wrote that curriculum than about what happened. ## Mali, Songhai, and the Wealth of West Africa When the Mali emperor Mansa Musa made his famous pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, he traveled with a retinue of sixty thousand men and distributed so much gold along the way that he temporarily crashed the gold price in Egypt and parts of the Middle East. Contemporary accounts describe the disruption to local economies persisting for more than a decade. The wealth he was distributing came from Mali's control of the trans-Saharan gold trade, one of the largest commercial networks in the medieval world. The Mali Empire itself grew out of the earlier Ghana Empire and was succeeded by the Songhai Empire, which at its peak in the fifteenth century was one of the largest states in the world by area. Its capital, Gao, was a major commercial hub. The city of Timbuktu, within the Songhai sphere of influence, was a centre of Islamic scholarship with universities and libraries holding hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, many of which survive today. ## Great Zimbabwe and the Southern African Kingdoms Great Zimbabwe was a stone-walled city complex in what is now Zimbabwe, built without mortar from granite blocks, that served as the capital of a powerful trading state between roughly 1100 and 1450 CE. At its peak, it housed around eighteen thousand people and served as the administrative centre for a kingdom that controlled trade routes connecting the African interior to the East African coast and the Indian Ocean trading networks. When European explorers encountered the ruins in the nineteenth century, several refused to believe that Africans had built them. The colonial authorities in Southern Rhodesia actually suppressed archaeological findings that confirmed the African origin of the site. The attempt to deny Great Zimbabwe its history became one of the most documented cases of ideologically motivated archaeology in the colonial period. ## Books That Restore This History **"The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence" by Martin Meredith** covers more recent history but contains essential background on the precolonial states whose territories and populations colonial powers divided and transformed. Meredith is a careful journalist and historian, and the book does not romanticise the precolonial past while making clear what was lost and distorted during the colonial period. **"African Civilizations: Pre-Colonial Cities and States in Tropical Africa" by Graham Connah** is an archaeological survey of urban and state development across sub-Saharan Africa before European colonisation. Connah covers West African urbanism, Great Zimbabwe, the Swahili coast cities, the Aksumite state in Ethiopia, and more, drawing on decades of fieldwork. It is scholarly but accessible, and it provides the physical evidence for claims about African state complexity. **"Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali" translated by D.T. Niane** is not a history book but the founding epic of the Mali Empire, preserved through generations of griots (the professional oral historians of West Africa) and recorded in the twentieth century. It tells the story of Sundiata Keita, the founder of the Mali Empire, a prince who overcame childhood disability and exile to defeat the sorcerer king Sumanguru Kante and unite the Mande peoples. Reading it alongside historical accounts gives a sense of how this empire understood itself and its origins. ## The Aksumite Empire and the Horn of Africa The Aksumite Empire, based in what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, was one of the great powers of the late antique world. At its peak in the fourth century CE, it was classified alongside Rome, Persia, and China as one of the four great kingdoms of the world by a Persian writer. It controlled trade across the Red Sea, minted its own gold coins, built massive stone obelisks that still stand, and was one of the first states in the world to adopt Christianity as an official religion, in the fourth century. Aksum's role in the history of Christianity is almost entirely absent from standard Western church history, which tends to focus on the Roman and Byzantine churches. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which traces its origins to the Aksumite conversion, has one of the oldest continuous Christian traditions in the world. ## Why This History Was Suppressed The systematic minimisation of African history in Western scholarship was not accidental. It served the ideological needs of colonial justification: if Africans had no complex political history, no sophisticated states, no tradition of urban life or written scholarship, then colonisation could be framed as bringing civilisation rather than destroying it. The same impulse produced the attribution of Great Zimbabwe to Phoenicians or Arabs, and the theft of Benin bronzes with the justification that Africans could not have produced such sophisticated art. Recovering this history is not an exercise in national pride. It is an exercise in accuracy. --- **Further reading:** [Explore more world history books on Skriuwer](/category/history)