Long before Christopher Columbus, an African king is said to have attempted to cross the Atlantic with two thousand ships. His name was erased, his feat forgotten. And yet, this predecessor of Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, dared the unthinkable: to reach the other side of the world. Between suppressed memory, historical hypothesis, and Afrocentric rehabilitation, we revisit the fascinating story of a king who chose the ocean over the crown.
A Mansa facing the ocean
Some stories are kept silent, like secrets too vast to be understood. More than seven centuries ago, on the Atlantic coast, an African king stood not to contemplate the horizon, but to cross it. He was not going to war, nor on a pilgrimage. He was seeking what no one had ever seen before. The unknown. The unreachable. The unimaginable. This king—whose name History erased—set sail with two thousand ships, years’ worth of provisions, abundant gold, and a wild idea: to reach the end of the ocean.
This was not Mansa Musa, the emperor known for his legendary wealth and opulent pilgrimages. No. It was the man who came before him. The one who relinquished the throne not through defeat, but by choice. In 1311, he gave up power for a quest for knowledge. He traded the comfort of rule for the brutality of the sea winds.
At a time when the world still claims that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America, this story from Mali is unsettling. Because if it’s true—even if only partly—it upends our entire understanding of history. It reveals an Africa that was dynamic, bold, and inventive. An Africa that did not merely endure history but sometimes led it.
Yet this story appears in no textbooks. It is taught in no curriculum. It has received no honors, no statues. We don’t even know the name of the king who lived it. All that remains is a testimony given to a Cairo emir in 1324 by Mansa Musa himself, and recorded by an Arab scholar named al-Umari.
Nofi follows the trail. Between the silences of the archives, the uncertainties of the ocean, and the power of Black memory, the goal here is to restore a forgotten chapter of history. To summon the voices that were silenced. And to remind the world that Africa, before becoming a victim of the crossing, may also have been its pioneer.
The words of Mansa Musa (the only testimony)
History sometimes hangs by a thread. A whisper. A confession shared in the quiet of a Cairo night. Mansa Musa, the king of endless gold, was in Egypt in 1324 on his way to Mecca. His passage dazzled the locals: he distributed so much gold that the dinar lost value. He was received with all the honors due to a powerful and respected sovereign. But behind the grandeur of the hajj, a more intimate and troubling story emerged.
An Egyptian emir, Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Amir Hajib, curious to know how Musa came to power, asked him the question. And Musa answered. He held nothing back. In fact, he casually shared what may be the strangest tale in all imperial West African history—the kind of story you listen to while holding your breath, unsure whether it’s a confession, a regret, or a warning.
“The king who preceded me,” Musa said, “did not believe that one could not reach the end of the ocean. He equipped 200 ships filled with men, and 200 more with provisions. He told the expedition leader: ‘Do not return unless you reach the end of the ocean, or if you run out of food and water.’”
Only one ship came back. The captain said they had encountered a powerful current, like a river in the sea. The other ships kept going. None returned. The king, undeterred, refused to believe in failure. He launched a second, even larger expedition—this time with two thousand ships—and went with them. He never came back. Musa, named regent, then inherited the throne.
This testimony, preserved by al-Umari, is the only known written source recounting this mass departure of African ships westward—well before Columbus. No other Arab chronicler mentions it. No Manding oral tradition transmits it. And yet, it endures. Like an obsidian shard in a desert of silence.
For historians, the question is daunting: why would Musa tell such a story, risking ridicule or disbelief? Was it a way to justify his unexpected rise to power? An act of remembrance, honoring a lost ambition? Or a painful confession about the cost of leadership?
This story, long pushed to the margins, deserves to be heard again—not just as a historical curiosity, but as a claim to intellectual dignity and Africa’s capacity for exploration. At a time when medieval Europe struggled to navigate beyond its shores, imperial Africa was looking toward the Atlantic.
And daring.
Who was this unknown king? a debate on his identity
It is strange that a king capable of assembling two thousand ships, voluntarily abdicating, and attempting to cross the Atlantic should remain nameless. Musa himself never uttered his name. Arab archives are silent. Manding oral traditions, rich in dynastic memory, offer no song about him.
And yet, his absence is a presence.
Over the centuries, several names have been suggested. The most famous—Abubakari II—is in fact a misconception born of a mistranslation. In the 19th century, a French orientalist, Baron de Slane, mistranslated a text by Ibn Khaldun. In that passage, Ibn Khaldun mentioned Abu Bakr as an ancestor of Musa, not his direct predecessor. But the error took root. Eager for order and names, 19th-century Europe added “Abubakari II” to the list of Malian kings. The mistake became accepted. The myth was born.
Modern scholars are gradually correcting this. Historian Nehemia Levtzion, a specialist in West African history, showed that the only Abu Bakr to rule was a grandson of Sundiata, who reigned before Sakura—not before Musa. As for Sundiata’s brother, Mande Bori, often mistaken for a king, he seems never to have ruled. The name “Abubakari II,” as it exists today, is a later invention, embraced by sincere but misinformed Afrocentric circles.
Other possibilities exist. The direct successor of Mansa Qu, according to both Ibn Khaldun and Manding genealogy, was Muhammad ibn Qu, a shadowy king who reigned briefly before Musa. Some historians identify Muhammad as the king of the oceanic expedition. Others think it was Mansa Qu himself, ruling at the turn of the 14th century.
But again, the texts hesitate, names shift, and genealogies blur. Despite its might, medieval Mali left no royal chronicles. Memory was passed by griots, not scribes. And when power is relinquished voluntarily—without war or betrayal—it sometimes leaves no trace. As if departure also meant erasure.
Perhaps that is what makes this figure so fascinating: his anonymity. He is not a crowned hero or glorified martyr. He is a disruptor. A sovereign who chose the void over routine. The unknown over continuity. A king who, facing the vastness of the Atlantic, chose to embrace it rather than fear it.
And if History forgot his name, it did not silence his act.
An oceanic ambition: 2,000 ships toward the unknown
Two thousand ships. One thousand for men. One thousand for provisions. A thousand chances of never returning. A thousand bets on a horizon no one had yet drawn. It is this number, above all, that captures the imagination. Two thousand vessels, departing from West Africa’s coast—with no map, no compass, no promise of return—into a nameless ocean, toward an end of the world no one had yet seen.
In early 14th-century Europe, no such venture existed. Northern Mediterranean kingdoms were still timidly exploring their coasts. Portugal was in the infancy of its naval exploits. Spain was not yet a unified power. And yet, thousands of kilometers away, the Mali Empire—then at its zenith—organized the largest maritime expedition ever launched by a Black civilization before the modern era.
To Arab chroniclers, the act seemed outrageous. But rather than madness, it reflected a visionary imperial logic. The king of Mali, ruler of a civilization structured around gold, salt, and knowledge, launched a quest for the ultimate unknown: to discover what lay at the end of the ocean. Not to conquer. Not to convert. But to know. His ambition was not military or religious, but exploratory, intellectual, philosophical. A boldness that radically challenges the still-persistent clichés of a passive, frozen, isolated African Middle Ages.
How can we imagine such a fleet? Built from shea or mahogany wood, guided by stars, carried by Sahelian winds. The men brought years’ worth of provisions, according to Musa: water, millet, dried fish, and gold—perhaps currency, or an offering to the ocean gods. Griots, no doubt, to preserve the songs. Blacksmiths. Manding navigators, heirs to the river traditions of the Niger and Senegal.
And then—silence. No return. No sign. Except one lone ship that came back to say:
“We encountered a river in the sea. The others continued. I turned back.”
This “river in the sea” fascinates. Today’s oceanographers recognize in it the Canary Current, a powerful ocean flow sweeping from West Africa to the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. A natural maritime highway that, in theory, could have carried the Malian fleet across the Atlantic without advanced technology.
But the currents are unforgiving. What carries you westward prevents your return. The king’s voyage was one-way.
This radical choice—to leave the known world, take an entire people with him, and vanish—is also a declaration of faith. A belief in the value of risk. A rebellion against stagnation. An offering to the unknown.
It is ironic that the maritime exploits of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, or Magellan are taught worldwide, while this far older, more ambitious crossing is virtually unmentioned. Official history does not honor silent failures. It prefers conquerors, flags planted in stolen soil, one-sided stories. Not departures without return.
And yet, this king dared to tear open the fabric of reality. And perhaps, in that unfinished gesture, lies true greatness.
The river in the sea: What ocean currents reveal
Some phrases echo like riddles, suspended between poetry and truth.
“There was, in the sea, a river with such a strong current that the ships that entered it never returned.”
This is what the lone survivor of the first expedition claimed. A river in the sea.
An image that defies logic. And yet today, scientists see it as a well-known physical reality: the Canary Current.
This ocean current flows from Northwest Africa toward the Caribbean, following the path of the trade winds. It’s what carried Columbus’s caravels to the New World in the 15th century. But it also, long before that, could have borne the Manding ships across the Atlantic.
Modern nautical charts confirm what West African navigators may have long suspected: the sea is not a wall, but a flowing river. An invisible road. A liquid highway—treacherous, but irresistible. One enters it like a myth, not knowing if one will emerge alive.
And that current, crucially, does not allow for return. Once swept westward, only powerful counter-winds or specialized sails can bring a ship back. Malian vessels—built for rivers, royal pirogues—were likely not built to return. They were built to depart.
It was not incompetence that sealed the fate of the expedition, but the very physics of the ocean. Not a shipwreck, but a sacrifice.
And if the other ships kept going, what became of them? Did they reach the Caribbean? The coasts of Brazil? Did they land somewhere, starved, to found a memoryless colony, an orphan page of human history? Or did they sink—like heavy prayers—into the dark depths of the Atlantic?
Some Afrocentric scholars, like Ivan Van Sertima or Gaoussou Diawara, argue that the ships did reach the New World. They cite Taíno accounts of Black men arriving from the southeast, bearing spears made of guanín—an alloy of gold, silver, and copper also found in West Africa. They reference Bartolomé de las Casas’s notes, which report Columbus’s own interest in tales of “canoes from Guinea” sailing westward.
But classical academic circles dismiss these as speculative, lacking material proof. They insist that no authenticated African artifacts, skeletons, or settlements have been found. Doubt prevails.
Yet the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. History’s storms often erase what leaves no written trace. And in the Atlantic, Black bodies have always sunk without tombstones.
So what remains? That current. That “river in the sea.” That intuition of a forgotten king who knew—or sensed—that something existed beyond the horizon.
An Africa that knew the ocean. An Africa unafraid to inscribe its story upon it.
What if America had already known Africa?
What if America hadn’t waited for Columbus to be touched by Africa’s wind? What if, long before the Catholic cross was planted in the soil of Guanahani, a Black sail—raised by a Manding king’s hands—had already grazed the shores of the New World?
The question unsettles. It challenges the way history is written, passed on, and taught. To even entertain this hypothesis is to challenge a symbolic global order: one in which Europe discovers, and Africa is discovered. One where Black people arrive in America in chains, not by choice. One where exploration is white, and Black crossings are only sufferings.
Yet, voices—scholarly and activist—have dared to defy this rigid narrative.
Ivan Van Sertima, a Guyanese intellectual educated at Rutgers University, popularized a bold thesis in the 1970s: Africans had traveled to the Americas long before Columbus. In his book They Came Before Columbus, he compiles stories, observations, and linguistic data to argue for an African presence in pre-Columbian America. He points to the Olmec heads—massive stone sculptures with supposedly African features—and Indigenous stories of visitors from the southeast.
Another compelling point: the testimonies recorded by Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, chronicler of the conquest. He wrote that the Indigenous people of Hispaniola said they had seen large canoes “filled with Black men” coming from the southeast. These men bore spears made of guanín—an alloy that the Spanish also found in African mines. Even King John II of Portugal questioned such stories circulating among 15th-century sailors.
But archaeological evidence remains elusive. That is the main argument of critics: no verified African artifacts have been unearthed in controlled digs of pre-Columbian America. No pottery, no texts, no skeletons. Nothing datable, analyzable, or able to withstand scholarly doubt.
And yet… The absence of material evidence does not mean the event never happened. Let us remember that conquistadors burned entire libraries, razed temples, and wiped out cultures. Black and Indigenous histories were subject to systematic erasure. Forgetting was organized.
Behind this academic debate is a battle over narratives. For if Malian ships did indeed reach America—if only for a moment—it would be a mental revolution. A reclamation of the imagination. A sign that Africa was not merely a victim of globalization, but a forgotten driving force.
And if we’ve found no tangible traces of this crossing, perhaps it’s because we’ve been asking the wrong questions. Or searching with the wrong lens. After all, History is not measured solely in excavated objects, but also in silenced memories.
And if faith is sometimes needed to envision what the archives refuse, so be it. For what we defend here is not a certainty, but a right to hypothesis. A right to intellectual exploration, to grounded dreaming, to reappropriation.
And if this unknown king—this sovereign without a tomb or statue—did set foot on American soil, then it would not be just a geographical discovery.
It would be a posthumous victory over oblivion.
Sources & references
- Al-Umari, Masalik al-Absar
- Ibn Khaldun, Kitāb al-ʿIbar
- Nehemia Levtzion & J.F.P. Hopkins, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, 2000
- Nehemia Levtzion, “The Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Kings of Mali,” Journal of African History, 1963
- D.T. Niane, Recherches sur l’empire du Mali au Moyen Âge, 1959 / Histoire générale de l’Afrique, UNESCO, 1984
- François-Xavier Fauvelle, Le rhinocéros d’or, 2013 / L’Afrique ancienne, 2021
- Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, 2018
- John K. Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820, 2012
- Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus, 1976
Table of contents
- A Mansa Facing the Ocean
- The Words of Mansa Musa (the Only Testimony)
- Who Was This Unknown King? A Debate on His Identity
- An Oceanic Ambition: 2,000 Ships Toward the Unknown
- The River in the Sea: What Ocean Currents Reveal
- What If America Had Already Known Africa?
- Sources & References
