No one can gainsay the importance of Arabic sources for the history of West Africa. While the Negro peoples of other parts of the continent were often cut off from effective contacts with the outside world until they became caught up in the great movement of European expansion which began in the fifteenth century, those of West Africa – or at least of its northern fringes – were able throughout history to maintain contact through the pastoral peoples of the Sahara with the civilizations of the Mediterranean. Following the Arab conquest of North Africa in the seventh century, the trans-Saharan links with West Africa became a subject of interest alike to the traders and the geographers of the world civilization of Islam.

The earliest surviving Arabic reference to the West African Bilād as-Sūdān, “the land of the black man”, south of the Sahara, dates, it would seem, from the eighth century. From the ninth and tenth centuries onwards, there is a considerable corpus of Arabic geographies, histories and travellers' accounts containing information about the Bilād as-Sūdān. This information has its limitations. The Arab world's knowledge of West Africa was effectively limited to the savanna lands of the Sudan that were accessible from the Sahara, and hardly extends at all to the southerly, forested region commonly known as Guinea. Much of this knowledge was not first hand.