Thus history brings about its revenges, for the Mandingans proper of the Kong plateau may fairly claim, despite their late servitude to the Fulah conquerors and their present ready acceptance of French rule, to be a historical people with a not inglorious record of over 1000 years, as founders of the two great empires of Melle and Guine, and of the more recent states of Moasina, Bambara, Kaarta, Kong, and others about the water-parting between the head-streams of the Niger, and the rivers flowing south to the Gulf of Guinea. Here is the district of Manding, which is the original home of the _Manding'ke_, _i.e._ "People of Manding," as they are generally called, although _Mande_ appears to be the form used by themselves[145]. Here also was the famous city of Mali or Melle, from which the Upper Niger group take the name of _Mali'nke_, in contradistinction to the _Soni'nke_ of the Senegal river, the _Jalo'nke_ of Futa-Jallon, and the _Bamana_ of Bambara, these being the more important historical and cultured groups. According to native tradition and the annals of Ahmed Baba, rescued from oblivion by Barth[146], the first Mandingan state of Guine (Ghana, Ghanata), a name still surviving in the vague geographical term "Guinea," goes back to pre-Muhammadan times. Wakayamangha, its legendary founder, is supposed to have flourished 300 years before the Hejira, at which date twenty-two kings had already reigned. Sixty years after that time the Moslem Arabs or Berbers are said to have already reached West Sudan, where they had twelve mosques in Ghana, first capital of the empire, and their chief stronghold till the foundation of Jinni on the Upper Niger (1043 A.D.). Two centuries later (1235-60) the centre of the Mandingan rule was transferred to Mali, which under the great king Mansa-Musa (1311-31) became the most powerful Sudanese state of which there is any authentic record. For a time it included nearly the whole of West Sudan, and a great part of the western Sahara, beside the Songhai State with its capital Gogo, and Timbuktu. Mansa-Musa, who, in the language of the chronicler, "wielded a power without measure or limits," entered into friendly relations with the emperor of Morocco, and made a famous pilgrimage to Mecca, the splendours of which still linger in the memory of the Mussulman populations through whose lands the interminable procession wound its way. He headed 60,000 men of arms, says Ahmed Baba, and wherever he passed he was preceded by 500 slaves, each bearing a gold stick weighing 500 mitkals (14 lbs.), the whole representing a money value of about L4,000,000 (?). The people of Cairo and Mecca were dazzled by his wealth and munificence; but during the journey a great part of his followers were seized by a painful malady called in their language _tuat_, and this word still lives in the Oasis of Tuat, where most of them perished.