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 amounts 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 sources 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.

 

So, how much of the story of Mansa Musa is actually accurate? I have no idea, but I have the strong suspicion that a lot of it is heavily mythologized and fictionalized, both by Al-Umari himself and then by later authors who might have "read between the lines" and fictionalized him even further.

Assuming that he existed at all, ie. the story is based on an actual person, who might or might not have been actually named "Mansa Musa" (it's not impossible that Al-Umari mis-transcribed his name based on what he heard), it may well be that:

• Perhaps he indeed was some kind of "king" or leader of some tribe from central or western Africa, who did have some amount of gold that his tribe had scooped from riverbeds (mining technology, even primitive one, did not exist in sub-Saharan Africa at the time in any way, so the only way to gather gold was by scooping riverbeds). Even if this tribe did own gold, the amount they had gathered is probably enormously exaggerated, probably by orders of magnitude. (There are no reliable accounts of this gold even existing, or how much of it there was, other than Al-Umari's dubious writings.)
• Perhaps he did travel to Mecca as described by historians, but if that happened, his caravan most likely consisted of just a few hundreds of people at most. In Al-Umari's sensationalized version his caravan became tens of thousands of people strong, just to make it sound more magnificent. (An army of tens of thousands of people traveling thousands of kilometers across the harsh Sahara desert is logistically extremely implausible, particularly for a tribe that was technologically in the Stone Age. There's also no logical reason why he needed so many people with him. It's not like he was going to war.)
• When in Egypt, it's possible that perhaps he did give gifts, perhaps even gold, to some people on the streets. This might have caused a commotion, with people hurrying to tell everybody that some mighty king was distributing riches to people, perhaps causing a crowd to quickly form. In Al-Umari's sensationalized account the handful of gifts became such an enormous amount that it outright collapsed Egypt's economy for years (even though there's no other credible historical account of this happening).
• It may also be that the entire "king giving out gold to people" was either just an unfounded rumor that started spreading for some reason, or it was purely an invention of Al-Umari himself, just to make his story sound even more awesome and fantastical. It does sound very much like a fable rather than actual history. (And, I believe, a good portion of historians doubt this part of the story.)