Upper Senegal and Niger, Vol. 2

of whom he knew the name—or the first prince of the Black race—among those who had reigned in the region where the empire of Mali later developed, resided at Ghâna; the literal translation of the paragraph, which would be the following, leaves no doubt in this regard: "Now [the] Mali [is] a great country occupying a considerable space in the most distant west (Maghreb-el-aqsa the Far Maghreb) toward the side of the surrounding sea (the Atlantic Ocean), and Qaya-Magha [was] he who began the domination in this region (1), and the seat of his power [was] Ghâna, which [was] a great city in the land of Bâghena."

I said above (2) that material impossibilities prevent us from granting the slightest credit to the theory of Lieutenant Desplagnes, according to which the recent and modest ruins of the small village of Gana near Banamba would be none other than the ruins of ancient Ghana; the latter, dating today from nearly seven centuries ago, would moreover be very difficult to find, given the probable nature of the fragile constructions that must have predominated in the city destroyed by Soundiata. To be fair, I must add that, if it is not possible to place Ghana in the region of Banamba, Mali on the other hand could not have been very far from this latter point, as we shall see further on; but Mali was situated closer to the Niger and had, moreover, likely disappeared when the small Banmana village, the ruins of which one sees today near the current Gana, was founded toward the end of the 17th or the beginning of the 18th century.

(1) We see that Sa'di did not say explicitly that Kaya-Maghan was the first king of Ghana: he wanted to indicate that Kaya-Maghan was the first prince of the Mande-Soninke dynasty who replaced the white-race dynasty at Ghana, that is to say the first prince of the Black race, as results from the following paragraphs (pages 18 and 19 of the Houdas translation); we shall return to this further on. The passage of the Tarikh-es-Soudan does not imply either that Ghana was situated in Mali, but simply that it was the residence of a king whose domination extended over regions which, later, formed part of Mali.
(2) Vol. 1, page 287. See also the supplement to the March 1910 issue of L'Afrique Française (pages 60 to 64), where the insignificant ruins that one can see currently a few kilometers from Banamba are described.