Charlotte MacDonald
speaker
1,889 appearances
62 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard Apr 2025
Charlotte MacDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's not Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos from the 21st century or a Rockefeller or a Rothschild from the 19th century but Manson Musa, the ruler of the West African Malian Empire in the 14th century.
Yes, today we're going to tell the story of Mansa Musa, the man the BBC, the Independent, CNBC, the Smithsonian and the History Channel have all called the richest man who ever lived.
For that, we'll have to travel back seven centuries, but we'll also tell the story of how he got to the top of the rich list.
And for that, we'll only have to travel back seven years.
Mansa Musa was born in the year 1280, or at least that's the best guess.
We don't actually know when he was born or when he died.
And that's the big problem we have with Mansa Musa.
We don't know that much about him.
We have a few mentions of him by Arab historians, but nothing written at the time of the events of his life or by anyone who actually met him.
What we can be sure of is that he was born into the Malian royal family and he inherited the Malian Empire from his brother, Mansa Abu Bakr, who sailed off across the Atlantic, never to be seen again.
Dr Afusu Mensa Ababayo, the head of the Department of History at the University of Ghana in Accra.
His empire covered an area the size of Western Europe.
The kingdom stretched for about 2,000 miles, from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to modern-day Niger, taking in parts of what are now Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Ivory Coast.
With this large landmass came resources like gold.
The British Museum said that during Mansa Musa's rule, the Empire of Mali accounted for almost half of the old world's gold.
Dr Ofusu Mensa Ababeo describes the land as impregnated.
Musa was a devout Muslim and it was his faith in some ways that built his reputation when he embarked on a pilgrimage to Mecca.
It was on this journey that Marley's wealth was exposed to the outside world.
As he travelled through Egypt, he gave away and spent so much of his gold that it created huge inflationary problems in Cairo and damaged the economy for 10 years.
And this wasn't a small city.
Showing 61–80 of 1,889 · page 4 of 95
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