Almoravid Conquest of Ghana

The Almoravid Conquest of Ghana refers to the traditional account, drawn from later Arabic sources, that the Almoravid movement, a Berber Muslim confederation based in northwest Africa, sacked Kumbi Saleh, capital of the Ghana Empire, in 1076 or 1077, driven partly by a wish to spread Islamic practice and partly by rivalry over control of the lucrative trans-Saharan gold and salt trade that passed through the city. Ghana's political and economic authority declined sharply in the years that followed, and by around 1086 the region had come under substantial Almoravid influence. Modern historians, notably Conrad and Fisher in a widely cited 1982 study, have challenged this traditional narrative, arguing that the idea of a decisive Almoravid military conquest may be a later exaggeration built on a misreading of the surviving Arabic sources rather than a single documented campaign, so that Ghana's decline is better understood as gradual than as the result of one conquering war.