Mali and Kanem; African empires whose prosperity was founded upon the slave trade

There is a great desire on the part of people of African and Caribbean heritage to boast of the wonders of Africa in the pre-colonial era. We are told, for instance, that the richest man who has ever lived was a black African ruler called Mansa Musa who ruled the empire of Mali. All this took place long before white people arrived in that part of Africa. What we seldom hear about though is that the empires of Mail and Kanem were, like the British Empire, founded upon the slave trade and that Mans Musa was as guilty of profiting by this business as was Edward Colston of Bristol Defrémery, C.; Sanguinetti, B.R. (Editors) (1858), Voyages d’Ibn Batoutah (Volume 4) (in French and Arabic), Paris: Société Asiatic. Levtzion, Nehemia; Hopkins, John F.P. (Editors) (2000) Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West Africa, New York: Marcus Weiner Press. Smith, Abdullahi (1972) History of West Africa, New York: Columbia University Press. Meredith, Martin (2014) The Fortunes of Africa, New York