This study focuses on the extensive business and trading empire that Mande-speaking merchants, trade brokers, and financiers built and ran across West Africa between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Wangara feature prominently in the economic and mercantile history of West Africa because they pioneered intra-regional long distance trading and investments. They faced and overcame obstacles to trade and investments in diverse cultural and political settings, leaving a legacy that is instructive for current discussions about Africans investing and trading across Africa.