Abu Bakr II

The ruler conventionally called Abu Bakr II occupies an unusual position in the history of the Mali Empire: nearly everything reported about him derives from a single anecdote. The Syrian scholar al-Umari, writing in Cairo in the 1340s, recorded what he was told of a conversation held during Mansa Musa's visit to the city in 1324. Asked how he had come to the throne, Musa reportedly explained that his predecessor had refused to believe the ocean had no farther shore and resolved to find it.

According to this account, the mansa first dispatched a fleet said to number several hundred vessels, provisioned for a long voyage, with orders not to return until they had reached the other side of the Atlantic or exhausted their supplies. A single ship came back, its captain describing a violent current that had swallowed the others. Unsatisfied, the ruler equipped a second and much larger expedition, entrusted the regency to Musa, and sailed at its head. He never returned, and Musa assumed the throne, presumably around 1312.

The story is reported by no other medieval source, and al-Umari himself received it at second hand. Oral tradition in Mali preserves no clear memory of the voyage, and the Timbuktu chronicles of later centuries do not mention it. Historians therefore treat the episode with caution: it may preserve a genuine memory of an Atlantic venture, a garbled account of some other event, or a narrative that served Musa's purposes in explaining an irregular succession. Modern claims that the expedition reached the Americas have no archaeological or documentary support and are not accepted by specialists.

Even the ruler's name and place in the dynasty are uncertain. Al-Umari does not name Musa's predecessor; the identification with a "Abu Bakr" rests on later reconstruction of the Keita king list, itself assembled from Ibn Khaldun's account and oral tradition, and some scholars doubt that a Mansa Abu Bakr II reigned at all under that name. His death is conventionally placed about 1312, the presumed date of his disappearance at sea.

Whatever its basis in fact, the account remains a notable document of medieval geography, recording an African court's curiosity about the limits of the Atlantic two centuries before the Iberian voyages.