Gold in Cape Town – Part 3

This extract is from ‘Travel Tales from Exotic Places like Salford’

Around 600AD the Arabs set up Cairo and soon started minting coins called ‘dinars’ made from West African gold which were eventually accepted as currency from Spain to Asia.
The ancient Zimbabwe culture flourished around 1000AD across what is now Botswana, Zimbabwe, southern Mozambique and the northern parts of South Africa. Gold was behind its rise to power but there’s a mystery behind the source of the gold. It’s known that gold was used and worked at Mapungubwe and also at Thula Mela, in what is now Kruger National Park, but evidence of mining has only been found at the World Heritage Site of Great Zimbabwe itself.

In 1324, Mansa Musa the ruler of Mali trekked across the Sahara on his pilgrimage to Mecca. He was accompanied by over 200 camels and more than 1000 servants. Mansa Musa took so much gold to pay for the journey, to give as alms, and to present as gifts that the price of gold in Cairo plummeted and didn’t recover for 12 years. Not surprisingly this single epic journey raised the profile of Mali in the eyes of Western Europeans and the Arab World and led to Mansa Musa’s image appearing on a map of the known world in
1375; he was depicted holding a nugget of gold.