The great traveler Ibn Battuta, who was born in 1304 at Tangier where present day Morocco sits along the North African coast. He first ventured out when he was only twenty-one and journeyed the entire eastern hemisphere until he was over fifty years of age. Ibn Battuta trekked across many lands and through present day countries such as Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Russia, India, China, Indonesia, and even Spain. But all of this has been done by European and Asian travelers and have been documented centuries before Battuta. What truly separates him form other great travelers of the day was his journeys to sub-Saharan African. His written accounts of his visits to the blossoming Swahili city-states on Africa's East Coast and the West African kingdom of Mali are one of the few primary historical sources for these civilizations in medieval times. Battuta is truly a window to the past, giving modern readers a look at the social, cultural, and political history of medieval African Islamic civilization.
He was really the first outside presence to experience first hand and to record the accounts he witnessed in West Africa. Ibn Battuta paints such a vivid picture of what he encountered, in that the reader seems to have acutely visited these ancient places and seen it all with their own eyes. He not only talks about kings, politics and wealth, but also takes a great concern in local products like food and textiles and also the treatment of women. He reported about the wealthy, multi-cultural trading centers at the African East coast, such as Mombasa and Kilwa, and the warm hospitality he experienced in Mogadishu. He also visited the court of Mansa Musa and neighboring states during its period of prosperity from mining and the trans-Saharan trade. He wrote disapprovingly of sexual integration in families and of a "hostility toward the white man." .
In Ibn Battuta in Black Africa, editors Noel King and Said Hamdun have selected and translated many of Ibn Battuta's writings about his travels in Africa.
