while i believe i had heard each of these stories on their own, this is also perhaps the first time i'd heard them all pieced together into a narrative, and this is useful in that sense, even if the narrative is scattered. i suppose that there's a civilizational complex underlying the various rulers, but this doesn't seem to have been a unified state or a national identity.

rather, i wonder if there isn't a struggle against the colonizing force of islam hidden in the narrative, as there is a struggle against christianity in so much of the history of northern europe. as he was going through this, i had that feeling of having heard this before - the outpost of the established religious empire, casting the various local rulers as cruel or wise depending on whether they upheld the religious authority or not. so, the ruler that tried to push back against the colonial entity in timbuktu is wicked and cruel, and the ruler that carried out a holy war against the heathens to the south is just and wise. you see the same types of histories in sweden and russia, and it's not merely bias, it's not merely the source...

the reality is that colonized people tend to react against the religion first when they push back, because it's the religion that's used as the tool of mental control. so, the religious histories will paint narratives of people willingly converting and casting away their barbarous and primitive ways; this is essentially always designed to cover up a real history of struggle against the religious authorities, which are essentially always acting out a cultural genocide against the colonized people. it's natural for the nationalized revolts to focus on the religious bodies, because it's the religious bodies that are the human face of the empire. 

so, was there in truth a struggle against the caliphate led by suni ali, and was that struggle ultimately defeated? it sort of sounds like it. but, the churches wrote all the histories in those days, so we remember what they want us to.

i'd also like to point out that the treatment of slavery here is refreshing, because you don't see it often nowadays. yes - slavery as we understand it was initially about religion and not race. it only became about race once abolitionists started converting africans to christianity and, even so, they took a biblical passage about the curse of ham to justify it.