Aboubakri II

Aboubakri II (or Abubakar II , called the “exploring emperor”) would be a emperor Mali which would have reigned of 1310 with 1312. In the tradition of the sovereigns navigators, it would have left towards the west to the coast the Atlantic Ocean, from where it would have launched two maritime forwardings to go to see “what there was on the other side of the large pond”. Having taken the head of the second, it would never have returned from there. Some proposed that he would have arrived to America where “blacks” were seen by certain of the first Europeans arrived on the continent, as brings it back Lopez de Gomara or Pierre Martyr of Anghiera. The theory of the crossing Malian précolombienne particularly held the attention of the afrocentrists and the islamocentrists.

The emperor navigator

The source of this history is in the encyclopedia Masalik Al-Absar of Aldine Shihab Al-Umari (1300-1349), active historian of origin Syria in Egypt. This last was 24 years old when the emperor Malian Mansa Musa defrayed the Egyptian chronicle by his high content in gold at the time of his pilgrimage with Mecque in 1324.

According to Al-Umari, to the governor of Cairo which requires of him how it obtained his throne, Musa Ibn Amīr Hājib answers that it first of all ensured the regency of the empire when its predecessor left towards the Atlantic Ocean. This last, persuaded that it was possible to reach the end of the sea, would have prepared several years during a fleet of 200 ships which it would have sent towards the west, with order not to return without result, or all at least not before the complete exhaustion of the vivres. A long time after, only one boat returned. According to the captain, the fleet had met a kind of powerful river in the middle of the ocean, and all the ships except for his had been absorbed in the swirls. The emperor then decided to take itself the head of a forwarding of 3000 buildings of which it never returned. Nevertheless, the emperor traveller is not named, and the testimony of Mansa Musa is subject to deposit: questioned by Fakhr AD-Dīn on the origin of gold Malian, he would have indeed answered that he left ground in the form of rings and pushed like vegetables.

Dubious identity

The identification of the sovereign navigator to an emperor named Aboubakri II rests especially on a chronology of the emperors of Mali established by the Africanist Maurice Delafosse (1870-1926) according to written sources, without the assistance of the oral tradition and according to an erroneous reading of the Arab sources due to a mistranslation. It is him which fixes its dates of reign at 1310-1312. Abou Bakr (Aboubakri), mentioned by Ibn Khaldoun like the ascending one of Musa Mansa, seems to him the best candidate to fill the two years interval which appears in its list between the reigns of Mansa Mohammed and Mansa Musa. Nevertheless, Ibn Khaldoun said makes some that after Muhammad bin qu, descendant of Soundiata Keïta, the capacity passed to Mansa Musa, resulting from Abou Bakr, brother of Soudianta. The list of Delafosse was generally shown, in spite of the doubts of some like Charles Monteil (1871-1949), which points out in 1929 qu' Abubakri II does not appear in any oral tradition mandingue.

However, some believe in the possibility of its existence. The historian Guianese Ivan Van Sertima of the Université Rutgers tried into 1976 to recall his voyage. The Guinean historian Djibril Tamsir Niane proposed that the name of Aboubakri did not appear in the oral tradition because the Griot S traditionalists preferred to use names preislamic, thus complicating the work of the historians. The writer Mali in Gaoussou Diawara thinks that Aboubakri II could be voluntarily been unaware of by the griots disapproving its company. This kind of censure is attested elsewhere in the tradition Malian. It composed in 1992 a part of théàtre whose Aboubakri is the hero, wrote in 1999 its biography, and inspired by the modern griots like Sadio Diabaté to sing its exploits.

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