By the middle of the eleventh century Ghana was the principal kingdom in the western Sudan.  Already the town had a native and a Mussulman quarter, and was built of wood and stone with surrounding gardens.  The king had an army of two hundred thousand and the wealth of the country was great.  A century later the king had become Mohammedan in faith and had a palace with sculptures and glass windows.  The great reason for this development was the desert trade.  Gold, skins, ivory, kola nuts, gums, honey, wheat, and cotton were exported, and the whole Mediterranean coast traded in the Sudan.  Other and lesser black kingdoms like Tekrou, Silla, and Masina surrounded Ghana.

In the early part of the thirteenth century the prestige of Ghana began to fall before the rising Mandingan kingdom to the west.  Melle, as it was called, was founded in 1235 and formed an open door for Moslem and Moorish traders.  The new kingdom, helped by its expanding trade, began to grow, and Islam slowly surrounded the older Negro culture west, north, and east.  However, a great mass of the older heathen culture, pushing itself upward from the Guinea coast, stood firmly against Islam down to the nineteenth century.

Steadily Mohammedanism triumphed in the growing states which almost encircled the protagonists of ancient Atlantic culture.  Mandingan Melle eventually supplanted Ghana in prestige and power, after Ghana had been overthrown by the heathen Su Su from the south.

The territory of Melle lay southeast of Ghana and some five hundred miles north of the Gulf of Guinea.  Its kings were known by the title of Mansa, and from the middle of the thirteenth century to the middle of the fourteenth the Mellestine, as its dominion was called, was the leading power in the land of the blacks.  Its greatest king, Mari Jalak (Mansa Musa), made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, with a caravan of sixty thousand persons, including twelve thousand young slaves gowned in figured cotton and Persian silk.  He took eighty camel loads of gold dust (worth about five million dollars) to defray his expenses, and greatly impressed the people of the East with his magnificence.

On his return he found that Timbuktu had been sacked by the Mossi, but he rebuilt the town and filled the new mosque with learned blacks from the University of Fez.  Mansa Musa reigned twenty-five years and “was distinguished by his ability and by the holiness of his life.  The justice of his administration was such that the memory of it still lives."[18] The Mellestine preserved its preeminence until the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the rod of Sudanese empire passed to Songhay, the largest and most famous of the black empires.