Unit
Years: 6th to the 16th century CE
Culture & Community
Economy & Society
Prior understanding of the role of human activity and agency in relation to geography, or in other words, how humans interact and draw from their geographies would be beneficial. Specifically, knowledge or resources to support students in their understanding of world geography and religion include:
You may want to consider after teaching this lesson: Why There? Historical Geographies of West Africa A Story of Great Cities Memory and Knowledge: The Story of Sundiata Keita West African Objects & Artifacts
Coined by Brenda Randolph (Howard University), the Gold Road celebrates the histories of trade and exchange that linked West African Sahel to the Mediterranean region and to the Arabian peninsula from the 6th to the 16th century, allowing for the development of the great kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. The Gold Road was the path for people carrying goods and ideas in a vastly interconnected West Africa. Gold was a central and sought-after resource and made West Africa known by outsiders.
The Gold Road is both an idea and a place.On the one hand, it refers to a physical network of routes across the Sahara and on the other hand, it is a concept for the centrality of Gold in the history of West Africa and the history of the global medieval period where Africa was central. The Gold Road was concurrent to, and linked to, the much wider known Silk Road. However, textbooks usually limit the role of Africa to the North only in discussions of the Silk Road. Teaching about the Gold Road in Africa therefore is a way of reinvesting accuracy in the story of trade and interconnection across the globe.
Gold was the region’s most valuable resource and people moved gold and other goods along regional and trans-Saharan routes reaching North Africa, Europe, and the Arabian peninsula. The gold trade thus enabled West Africans to build cities, cavalries, palaces, mosques, and personal libraries filled with manuscripts. Africa was globally interconnected and the center of massive wealthy empires that consecutively thrived there.
Coined by Brenda Randolph (Howard University), the Gold Road celebrates the histories of trade and exchange that linked West African Sahel to the Mediterranean region and to the Arabian peninsula from the 6th to the 16th century, allowing for the development of the great kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. The kingdoms were organized into polities that subsumed smaller polities within them. These great empires thrived in West Africa from the years 500-1591 and their kingdoms represent an era of consolidated West African power and wealth for over a thousand years.
Empires:
Similar to the Mali kingdom, Sonyi Ali Beeri took over territories of neighboring groups and expanded their territory. The Songhai ruled from 1469-1591 when it was conquered by the army of Sultan Al Mansur from Morocco, led by Judar Pasha. The fall of the Songhai empire was a pivotal turning point for West Africa because it ushered in a chaotic era of political fragmentation and war between small states and chieftaincies. This political vulnerability, in turn helped make way for the Transatlantic enslavement and trade of peoples.
Impact of Outsiders:
Gold as a central and sought-after resource soon made West Africa known by outsiders. The rich sources became known to populations North of the Sahara and Europe. Mansa Musa, one of Mali’s rulers made a famed pilgrimage to Mecca and his voyage made Mali known to the capitals of Europe whose rulers wanted to find the precious sources of African gold.
It is not a coincidence that African kings are represented with riches and gold in the maps of Dulcert in 1339 and the Catalan Atlas of 1375. Europeans knew about this immense wealth in gold. And indeed, “vast quantities of African gold poured into European coffers” (French, 2021, p. 79) via intermediaries but Europeans sought a more direct way to it. It is this gold that the Portuguese and other Europeans had heard about that drove the Portuguese to push through around the West African coast, bypassing North Africa to reach the coast. The founding of Elmina (“the mine” castle by the Portuguese on the coast of modern Ghana) in 1482 was the first European structure on the continent and a testament to the desires of Europeans for mining gold.
It is gold that ushered in a series of world historical transformations that fueled the Trans-Atlantic enslavement and trade of Africans.
For knowledge building about the context and this history, teachers may choose to show:
Badawi, Z. (2020). Desert Empires in the BBC African History Series [Episode 10] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shEU4PQUxxA&list=PLajyiGz4JeyPq2lpEt2skZRhQsAspIQCp&index=11&t=38s on 12/5/2023
Berzock. K. B. (2019). Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa. Princeton University Press.
Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time. Block Museum of Art “Teachers’ Guide.“ .
Northwestern University Retrieved from https://caravansofgold.org/resources/further-resources/ on 9/6/2022.
Conrad, D. (2005) Empires of Medieval West Africa: Ghana, Mali, Songhai.
French, H. W. (2021). Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the making of the modern world, 1471 to the Second World War. New York: Liveright Publishing Company.
Gold Road Lessons: Gold, Goods and Gold Road. Retrieved from https://cfas.howard.edu/gold-road/teaching-resources on 12/5/2023.
Gomez, M. (2018). African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and
Medieval West Africa. Princeton University Press.
The Gold Road. Howard University Center for African Studies. Retrieved from http://thegoldroad.org/map.aspx
The objectives of this unit include the opportunity to highlight, learn about and celebrate the great empires of Africa. A key component of this is explaining how gold enabled the development of great kingdoms and impacted the lives of people who controlled and sourced it. It is important that students can develop a grounding of what life in West Africa entailed in order to both understand the devastating impact on the lives of African people that were enslaved as well as the importance of African heritage and traditions in the lives of African Americans in the past and present day.
It is important that even as students learn about and enjoy exploring the Gold Road, that there is a connection made to how European quests for gold would later transform into incursions to enslave people. Further, that gold was the key resource that began a labor regime that was based on racism and that would be devastating to the people of the continent, fill the coffers of European capitals, and forever transform global relations. It is thus crucial for students to understand the context of these world historical events and what we now know as the racial capitalist economy.
The Gold Road Interactive Map:
All of the core aspects of the history of the Gold Road and the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, can be found on an interactive online map called The Gold Road (http://thegoldroad.org/map.aspx#) around which this unit is based.
The Gold Road is a library of detailed content for independent or scaffolded student inquiry and research. It allows students to explore and make connections in one time period’s people, places, trade items, buildings and routes, or across several time periods. Students can also choose a more focused inquiry on a specific item, a place, or a person and their significance. Thus a student can trace the linkages between people, items, places, routes, and significant buildings or focus on one aspect of this history. A student can make meaning linking micro aspects of this history (e.g. a person or a building) with macro aspects (the role it/they/he/she played in the whole kingdom).
It is strongly recommended that you test out and explore how the map works on your own before launching any activity that uses the map. In this way, you can help answer any technical questions about how to retrieve information and how the layers and markers work before students are tasked with an inquiry.
Detailed instructions and student handouts on How to use The Gold Road map and some of its features are available through the Digital Toolkit.
Teachers may modify and adapt these instructions as they introduce the map and activities to students throughout the unit.
Three great empires thrived in the Sahel region of West Africa, from the year 500 to 1591. These are the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. People in these empires were not isolated from the rest of the world. Rather, they built their economies on trade of many items, and in particular, on the trade of gold which was sourced further South, in the forested area of the Savannah. The trade reached faraway places, including Europe and Asia.
The trade enabled the kings of these empires to levy taxes and thus to amass great fortunes. In the 10th century CE, Islam came to West Africa and, as is custom in Islam, a pilgrimage (the Hajj) to Mecca is an important pillar of faith. Many kings of Mali traveled to Mecca. One of them, Mansa Musa brought with him great riches and displays of wealth and power. Through traders, pilgrimages, and also through geographers’ travel and writings, outsiders came to know of West Africans’ gold and the resource became sought-after and desired by many.
Select the activities and sources you would like to include in the student view and click “Launch Student View.”
It is highly recommended that you review the Teaching Tips and sources before selecting the activities to best meet the needs and readiness of your students. Activities may utilize resources or primary sources that contain historical expressions of racism, outdated language or racial slurs.
As an activator, put the following words up on the board or display this online slide:
global connections | kingdoms | gold | empire | trade | library | manuscripts | knowledge | science | culture | literacy | technology | travel | intercultural | contact | Islam | power | money | influence | respect | pilgrimage | religion | riches
Then, ask your students the following questions, getting student responses between questions.
After activating their curiosity, if they have not already correctly identified it, explain to students that these key words represent the story of three powerful successive kingdoms in West Africa from approximately 500 -1500. Provide the students with the student context handout and allow them time to read and ask any questions they may have.
Teacher Tip-If students express surprise, use explicit teaching to point out that these themes are usually not associated with Africa in the curriculum and that this(ese) lesson(s) will teach them to be experts in this silenced aspect of history.
If they have prior knowledge of it you may also want to make a connection to the greater knowledge of the Silk Road than of the Gold Road. You could also ask students to consider why they did not know and discuss the socialization influences in shaping their world view of Africa, which is an excellent self-awareness task about recognizing bias in media, policy, academia, K-12 curriculum, among other areas.
The Gold Road
Vocabulary & Key Terms:
Student Context:
Three great empires thrived in the Sahel region of West Africa, from the year 500 to 1591. These are the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. People in these empires were not isolated from the rest of the world. Rather, they built their economies on trade of many items, and in particular, on the trade of gold which was sourced further South, in the forested area of the Savannah. The trade reached faraway places, including Europe and Asia.
The trade enabled the kings of these empires to levy taxes and thus to amass great fortunes. In the 10th century CE, Islam came to West Africa and, as is custom in Islam, a pilgrimage (the Hajj) to Mecca is an important pillar of faith. Many kings of Mali traveled to Mecca. One of them, Mansa Musa brought with him great riches and displays of wealth and power. Through traders, pilgrimages, and also through geographers’ travel and writings, outsiders came to know of West Africans’ gold and the resource became sought-after and desired by many.
Introduce your students to the Gold Road Map using the detailed instructions and student handouts on How to use The Gold Road available through the Digital Toolkit.
Once online, ask your students to read or listen to the Welcome Message on the site in order to answer the question Why is this online map titled “The Gold Road?” and complete page 1 of the Why the Gold Road Question Sheet
Explain to students that you will be spending the class block introducing them to the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali and Songhai and that there will be key words you will allow them to explore on the map during the class period. If there are concerns for classroom focus and/or management as this requires moving flexibly from whole group to small group you may also want to consider displaying one map and having students come up to the board or device to interact rather than doing so independently.
Read aloud the following overview of the great kingdoms to students. As you read, pause to ask and answer clarifying questions and pause at bolded words to allow students time to explore The Gold Road map (searching or toggling over words will bring up definitions and details). Students should both note and share their findings. You may opt to provide students with blank paper or provide the overview as a handout for them to jot or annotate their findings on.
Coined by Brenda Randolph (Howard University), the Gold Road celebrates the histories of trade and exchange that linked West African Sahel to the Mediterranean region and to the Arabian peninsula from the 5th to the 15th century, allowing for the development of the great kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. The kingdoms were organized into polities that subsumed smaller polities within them. These great empires thrived in West Africa from the years 500-1591 and their kingdoms represent an era of consolidated West African power and wealth for over a thousand years.
Coined by Brenda Randolph (Howard University), the Gold Road celebrates the histories of trade and exchange that linked West African Sahel to the Mediterranean region and to the Arabian peninsula from the 5th to the 15th century, allowing for the development of the great kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. The kingdoms were organized into polities that subsumed smaller polities within them. These great empires thrived in West Africa from the years 500-1591 and their kingdoms represent an era of consolidated West African power and wealth for over a thousand years.
Depending on access to classroom technology, divide students up in order to ensure that each student or group has access to a tablet or computer for this online activity.
If you have not already done so, introduce your students to the Gold Road Map using the detailed instructions and student handouts on How to use The Gold Road available through the Digital Toolkit. Once online, ask your students to read or listen to the Welcome Message on the site in order to answer the question Why is this online map titled “The Gold Road?” and complete page 1 of the Why the Gold Road Question Sheet
Allow students to explore independently or in small groups using and navigating the tools on the site. They should respond to the question on page 2 in the handout using evidence from their map quest to support their answers.
As you circulate amongst the students or as you review their findings, you may want to use the answers and tips below to extend and develop the class discussion further.
The Gold Road has provided a Gold and Goods lesson complete with interactive Powerpoint that we recommend that you utilize in order to provide a comprehensive overview for students to be able to respond to:
As an extension to this activity and to begin to move students towards an understanding of how excursions to the region for gold later significantly impacted the people and the land you may opt to show students Elmina Castle. This castle was the (meaning “The mine” to signify “gold mine” in Portuguese) was the first European castle on the continent, built by the Portuguese in search of gold and in connection to further excursions to the region in search of gold.
Elmina Castle was later claimed by both the Dutch and the English and ultimately became a post used to imprison and “trade” enslaved Africans as the “goods”. Built for easy access to the sea, the castle featured a door facing the water that came to be known as the “door of no return” for those who walked through it and were forced to board vessels. By most accounts, more than 30,000 enslaved people passed through Elmina Castle each year for nearly three hundred years.
Thoughtfully introduce this project by identifying the emotions that this history will evoke. You can practice an intentional pedagogy of emotions, by adding guiding language such as “This is hard history. You might feel sadness, anger, or other strong emotions. I invite you to be aware of your feelings as there will be opportunity to reflect on them later. The bigger goal of learning about this hard history is to invite us all to use our feelings and our knowledge and to act so that it never happens again.”
Choose the filter and options on The Gold Road site, students should select one person from the three great empires to do additional research on. They will then design a poster or presentation to share with the class that provides facts that indicate their importance (i.e. Who, What, Where, When, Why) as well as identifies the importance of the figure in terms of a lasting legacy in the region and beyond.
Encourage students to select someone where a link can be made with gold. For example, students could choose to research the writings of Al Bakri (1040-1094) who wrote about Ghana after he learned from Muslim travelers. Primary sources of his writings mention gold. Students could also choose Mansa Suleyman (1341-1360), the brother of Mansa Musa, among others in Mali. Leo Africanus (b. 1492) is an interesting person to research during the time of the Songhai empire. To look up people whose name comes up alongside gold, turn on the people layer and select a time period. All the people for that time period will come up. Then search for gold in the search box, which will reduce the list of people to those whose markers mention gold.
Please login or sign up to access the student view functions.
