When and paired the ‘explorer’ in words a sentence, are ‘Africa’ most people’s minds immediately leap to the well-known European adventurers who famously felt their way around the ‘Dark Continent’ in the heady days of the 19th century. But Africa was populated by sophisticated civilisations and governed by advanced empires for centuries before the likes of David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley showed up, and these societies had homegrown explorers of their own - people who yearned to know what lay outside their realm and beyond the big blue horizon.
Chief among these - or so the story goes, because little remains in the form of written history - was a man called Abubakari II (also known as Abu Bakr II and Abu Bakari), who ruled Mali and a gold-rich area that incorporated most of West Africa in the 14th century. Life as the head of arguably the largest and wealthiest empire on the planet seemingly wasn’t enough for Abubakari, however, and no amount of treasure could soothe his itchy feet.