Mali Empire

Read the evidence.

Zero flags — and that is the finding. This article on the pre-colonial Malian empire (c. 1235–1610) is a model of the practices the methodology tests for. Every external source is explicitly attributed and marked — Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun, al-Umari, Leo Africanus — and Mandinka oral tradition and the griots are given co-equal standing, with disputes between the written and oral records openly narrated (the entire capital-location section holds Delafosse's colonial-era hypothesis up against oral history and 21st-century archaeology, tagged 'possibly erroneous'). Naming material is Indigenous, with locals' rejection of a European etymological hypothesis foregrounded. The article's treatment of sources is precisely what decolonial historiography asks encyclopedias to do.