History · Mali

Mali: The Empires of the Sahel

The Niger Bend where Ghana, Mali and Songhai grew rich on gold and where Timbuktu became a city of scholars — then a French colony, a praised democracy, and, since 2012, a jihadist war zone

By Worldlore Editorial · 19 September 2026

A 19th-century engraving of flat-roofed clay houses and round huts stretching to the horizon, with a tall tapering mosque tower rising above them and robed figures on a roof terrace in the foreground
Timbuktu seen from the roof terrace of the explorer Heinrich Barth's house, with the Sankore mosque on the skyline — an engraving from the 1859 edition of his Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa. (Heinrich Barth / Wikimedia Commons · Public domain)

The heartland of the Western Sudan

Mali is a large, landlocked country of Sahara and Sahel, held together by the Niger River, which arcs through its centre past the trading cities of Djenné, Timbuktu and Gao. It is one of the poorest countries on Earth today. But the bend of the Niger was, for seven centuries, the seat of three of the greatest states in medieval Africa — Ghana, Mali and Songhai — built on the trade in gold and salt across the desert, and on the scholarship of Timbuktu.

A short history

  1. c. 300–1200 CE

    The Ghana Empire

    The Soninke "land of gold" controls the desert trade.

  2. c. 1235–1600

    The Mali Empire

    Founded by Sundiata Keita; at its 14th-century peak, one of the world's largest.

  3. 1324

    Mansa Musa's pilgrimage

    His gold makes Mali famous in Europe and the Islamic world.

  4. c. 1464–1591

    The Songhai Empire

    Based at Gao; the largest of the three.

  5. 1591

    Tondibi

    A Moroccan army with firearms destroys Songhai.

  6. 1890s

    French conquest

    "French Sudan" is absorbed into French West Africa.

  7. 1960

    Independence

    The Republic of Mali, under Modibo Keïta.

  8. 1991–2012

    Democracy

    Two decades of praised multiparty rule.

  9. 2012

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    A Tuareg-jihadist rebellion and a coup break the state.

  10. 2020 / 2021

    The junta

    Coups bring a military government that breaks with France.

Ghana, Mali, Songhai

The Ghana Empire, in the far west, was known to Arab writers as the source of West Africa's gold. It gave way, in the 13th century, to the Mali Empire, founded by Sundiata Keita of the Malinke, whose story is preserved in a still-recited oral epic. Mali controlled the gold fields and the Niger trade cities, and became, in the 14th century, one of the largest empires in the world.

Mali and Timbuktu

A detail from the 1375 Catalan Atlas showing an enthroned African king holding a gold nugget
Mansa Musa of Mali on the 1375 Catalan Atlas. His 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca distributed so much gold that its price in Cairo was depressed for years. (Attributed to Abraham Cresques / Wikimedia Commons)
Hands resting beside a stack of loose, age-browned manuscript pages covered in handwritten Arabic script, with a soft brush on the table behind
A Timbuktu manuscript being cleaned by hand in Bamako in 2019. Timbuktu became a renowned centre of Islamic learning, holding hundreds of thousands of manuscripts. (Mark Fischer / Wikimedia Commons)

Songhai, based at Gao, eclipsed Mali in the 15th century and became the largest of the three empires — until 1591, when a Moroccan army crossed the Sahara with firearms and shattered it at Tondibi. The region then broke into smaller states, and Timbuktu declined.

French rule

France pushed east from Senegal through the second half of the 19th century, defeating the Bambara, the Toucouleur empire, and finally Samori Touré in 1898. "French Sudan" became part of French West Africa — a poor colony valued for cotton and for the soldiers and labourers it supplied.

Independence and democracy

French Sudan briefly federated with Senegal, and when that broke up it became the Republic of Mali on 22 September 1960, keeping the old empire's name.

Modibo Keïta in a suit at an official meeting in 1963
Modibo Keïta (right), Mali's first president — a socialist and pan-Africanist. A 1968 coup brought Moussa Traoré, who ruled for 23 years through the great Sahel droughts. (Jpvallat / Wikimedia Commons)

Pro-democracy protests toppled Traoré in 1991, and Mali became a widely admired democracy for two decades — a free press, decentralisation, and a celebrated music scene — over a base of deep poverty, weak state presence in the north, and recurring Tuareg rebellions.

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A Tuareg man in a bright turban at a desert festival near Timbuktu in 2012
The Festival au Désert near Timbuktu, in early 2012. Within months, jihadist groups controlled the north, imposed harsh rule, and destroyed the Sufi shrines of Timbuktu. (Alfred Weidinger / Wikimedia Commons)

After the fall of Gaddafi in 2011, heavily armed Tuareg fighters returned from Libya and, with Islamist groups, seized the north in early 2012. A coup in Bamako deepened the chaos, and the jihadists took the northern cities. As they advanced south in January 2013, France intervened, retaking the towns, and a UN mission followed — but the insurgency spread and mutated, engulfing central Mali and crossing into Niger and Burkina Faso.

Colonel Assimi Goïta in uniform, 2021
Colonel Assimi Goïta, who led coups in 2020 and 2021. His junta expelled French and UN forces, hired Russian mercenaries, and joined the juntas of Burkina Faso and Niger in leaving ECOWAS. (Voice of America / Wikimedia Commons)

Two coups in 2020 and 2021 brought a military government that broke with France, turned to Russia's Wagner mercenaries — implicated in mass killings — and postponed elections indefinitely. The jihadist war has continued to worsen, with groups blockading towns across the country.

What Mali carries

Mali's name is a claim on a glorious past: the empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai, and the scholarly city of Timbuktu, are among the strongest counter-examples to the idea that pre-colonial Africa had no history. The modern state has struggled to match that inheritance — and since 2012 it has struggled simply to hold together, as a jihadist insurgency it cannot defeat spreads across the Sahel it once ruled.

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