Maghan I

This is a man whose legs were so withered and useless that his own father's other wives mocked him openly, that the boy king was carried everywhere on the backs of servants while his younger half-brothers ran and played and inherited the confident swagger of princes who expect the world to bend to them.

Sundiata's mother, Sogolon Kédju, a woman said to be descended from a buffalo spirit, endured years of cruelty because of her son's affliction, the whispered insults, the poisoned barbs disguised as pity, the slow social death that comes from being the mother of a cripple in a world that worships strength.

But something happened to that crippled boy, something that the griots, the oral historians and praise singers whose sacred duty it is to remember word for word, generation after generation, the deeds of kings, have sung about for eight hundred years with undiminished wonder.

One day, so the story goes, Sogolon could bear the mockery no longer.

She needed baobab leaves for a dish, and the other wives, in their cruelty, refused to share theirs, taunting her that her son was too weak to fetch his own.

And something in young Sundiata broke open, some dormant fire finally catching flame.

He called for an iron rod.

And crucially, the charter speaks of trade, of the free movement of goods and merchants across the growing territory, planting the seed of the very economic engine that would, generations later, make Mali synonymous throughout the known world with wealth beyond imagining.