West African Empires

From their mountaintop settlements in what is now northern Nigeria, the Nok people produced a striking visual record that stands as the earliest large-scale, three-dimensional figurative art in continental Africa…

Long before the name was claimed by a modern West African nation in 1957, Ghana was the title of a warrior king who ruled a vast western-Sahelian empire.

Deep within the protective canopy of the West African rainforest, a society took root by exploiting a dense landscape that was as much a natural fortress as it was a treasury of resources.

A child crippled from birth, mocked alongside his hunchbacked mother in the royal court, seemed an unlikely candidate to forge one of history’s greatest empires.

Before it was an empire, Mali was a modest Mandinka kingdom huddled along the upper reaches of the Niger River, waiting for history to shift.

To understand the Asante Empire, one must understand that its very name, derived from the Twi words for war and because of, translates to because of war.

To strip a child of his name is to attempt to erase his past, and by the time he was purchased by a Royal Navy lieutenant, the boy from West Africa had already been called Michael and Jacob.

In the winter of 1804, a migration of devout dissidents fled the wrath of the Hausa King Yunfa, who had attempted to assassinate their leader, Usman dan Fodio.