Was the story of Mansa Musa invented by one single person?

If you search for the richest people who ever existed, some such lists will have one "Mansa Musa" at the top, some kind of king of western Africa from the 1300's.

How rich was he? How much wealth did he have?

We don't know. Nor do these lists tell how much it was. So how do we know he was the richest person who ever existed? We don't. He just is, because he is, period. Sure, we don't know how much wealth he had, but he's still the richest person who ever existed. Because.

I'm not even kidding.

Historians, and of course Wikipedia, have a very detailed account of his life and acts. These are recounted in great detail and with conviction, as if they were very well known and certain indisputable historical facts. These include the historical "fact" that he once traveled from western Africa across the Saharan desert all the way to Egypt with several tens of thousands of people and innumerable amount of gold, and freely distributed this gold there, causing an economic crash. Even very precise years are listed for all these events.

So certainly there are plenty of source for all these details? Certainly all of this is accounted by numerous historians from all the countries that he visited and traveled through, including Egypt and Mecca?

However, when you dig into it, you'll find that there's actually only one single primary source for pretty much all of these claims: A historian named Al-Umari, who lived at about that time.

There are many things that cast doubt on the entire thing.

Of course a big red flag is the single primary source for all of this. Serious historians very rarely rely on single-source claims because such sources can be unreliable and biased, and there's no proof that what they wrote is historically accurate. Historians prefer it if there are numerous independent sources who clearly recount the historical events independently of each other (rather than just clearly copying from the original singular source).

Not in this case, though. For some reason historians seem to rely on this singular source, plus the few vague mentions of that king in a few other later sources.

The thing is, the writings of Al-Umari are not reliable. They read more like fables and exaggerations, and the same text that talks about Mansa Musa also contains other mythological claims, like for example that there's a stone in Syria with the power to magically cure fatal snake bites. In fact, the entire text uses a style of writing that was common at the time and region, where fantastic events are exaggerated and even invented, a writing style of the form "fantastic stories of the world" or the sort.

Many of the claims made by Al-Umari are dubious at best. There are no other historical records about some kind of economic collapse or recession in Egypt caused by some king distributing copious amounts of gold. Heck, there are no other contemporary historical records about such a king distributing any gold in Egypt. Al-Umari is literally the only source for this claim. (Any other sources making the claim are significantly later, and clearly just copying Al-Umari's text.)

There are also no other records of an alleged procession of tens of thousands of people crossing the entire Sahara desert, carrying literal tons of gold. The entire story just reeks of fiction.

It's quite notable, as can be seen from the Wikipedia article, that a lot of the sources for all this history were written in the 2010's and 2020's. Why is this significant? Because trying so hard to boost the credibility of the story of Mansa Musa seems to be very politically motivated.

The modern far left has been engaging in historic revisionism for a couple of decades now, and this just reeks of being part of that movement. In this case the historic revisionism is trying to claim that sub-Saharan Africa in the Middle Ages was rich and prosperous and modern, until the evil white people came and destroyed and pillaged everything.

A king who had so much gold that it can't even be measured, fits well in this narrative.

And this is an actual argumentative tactic that leftist activists are using. If you claim that sub-Saharan Africa was effectively still in the Stone Age during the European Middle Ages, many of them will refer to the "Mansa Musa" story and call you a racist. It really helps them when so many "historians" of the 2020's are boosting the credibility of the story.

A story based on one single source of dubious credibility. A source that also talks about magical stones that can cure snake bites.