Al-Bakri describes Ghana in the ‘Book of Roads and Kingdoms’

Al-Bakri, the son of the ruler of a short-lived principality at Huelva, studied in Córdoba with the geographer al-Udri and the historian Ibn Hayyan, lived in Seville and Almería and never travelled to the lands he described. His Kitab al-masalik wa-l-mamalik, completed in AH 460 (1067/1068), survives only in fragments; for Africa he drew on the work of the 10th-century writer Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Warraq and on merchants who traded across the Sahara, adding news of recent events.

The city of Ghana, he wrote, consisted of two towns on a plain, six miles apart, with continuous habitation between them. The Muslim town was large, with twelve mosques, salaried imams and muezzins, jurists and scholars, and wells of sweet water where vegetables were grown. The king's town, al-Ghaba, had his palace and domed dwellings within an enclosure like a city wall, a mosque for Muslim visitors near the court, and groves where the priests of the traditional religion lived; the kings were buried under great mounds together with their belongings. The ruler since 1063, Tunka Manin, had succeeded his uncle Basi, for the kingship passed to the son of the king's sister; his interpreters, his treasurer and most of his ministers were Muslims. The king levied a duty of one dinar on salt brought into the country and two on salt taken out, and kept for himself the gold nuggets found in his lands, leaving only the gold dust to his people. Al-Bakri also describes Ghana's neighbours — among them Silla on the Senegal, "almost a match for the king of Ghana" — and the first conquests of the Almoravids, whom he already calls al-murabitun.

Excavations since 1914 at Koumbi Saleh in southern Mauritania, often identified with the capital he described, have revealed a stone-built Muslim town with a congregational mosque, but no inscription names the site, the king's town has not been found and the urban settlement dates mainly from the 11th to the 14th century; some scholars look for the capital elsewhere. Al-Bakri wrote on the eve of great changes: an ambiguous passage of Ibn Khaldun (14th century) was long read as an Almoravid conquest of Ghana in 1076–1077, which many historians now doubt, and by the time al-Idrisi wrote in 1154 the country was Muslim.