Abu Bakr II, also spelled Abubakri and known as Mansa Qu, may have been the ninth mansa of the Mali Empire. He succeeded his nephew Mansa Mohammed ibn Gao and preceded Mansa Musa. Abu Bakr II abdicated his throne in order to explore "the limits of the ocean".
Background
Abu Bakar was one of two sons of Cheikh Anta Diop, a sister of the founding emperor Sundiata Keita. He was the last of a mini-dynasty within the Keita clan of emperors descending from Kolonkan. After his abdication in 1311, the Faga Laye mini-dynasty would control the empire.
Reign
Virtually all that is known of Abu Bakr II is from the account of Chihab al-Umari. Al-Umari visited Cairo after Mansa Musa stopped there during his historic hajj to Mecca, and recorded a conversation between Musa and his host, Abu'l Hasan Ali ibn Amir Habib. According to Musa, Abu Bakr became convinced that he could find the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, and outfitted two expeditions to find it. Following Abu Bakr II's failure to return from the second of those expeditions, Mansa Musa acceded to the throne.
Atlantic expeditions
The Arab-Egyptian scholar Al-Umari quotes Mansa Musa as follows:
Trans-Atlantic travel
and Malian researcher Gaoussou Diawara, proposed that Abu Bakr II traveled to the New World. Van Sertima cites the abstract of Columbus's log made by Bartolomé de las Casas, according to which the purpose of Columbus's third voyage was to test both the claims of King John II of Portugal that "canoes had been found which set out from the coast of Guinea and sailed to the west with merchandise" as well as the claims of the native inhabitants of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola that "from the south and the southeast had come black people whose spears were made of a metal called guanín ... from which it was found that of 32 parts: 18 were gold, 6 were silver, and 8 copper." However, many archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnohistorians, linguists, and other modern pre-Columbian scholars say that there is no evidence of any such voyage reaching the Americas, and that there are insufficient evidentiary grounds to suppose there has been contact between Africa and the New World at any point in the pre-Columbian era. For views representative of this point of view, see the considerations on the question advanced in Haslip-Viera et al., who for example note "no genuine African artifact has ever been found in a controlled archaeological excavation in the New World". See also the supporting responses in peer-review printed in the article, by David Browman, Michael D. Coe, Ann Cyphers, Peter Furst, and other academics active in the field. Ortiz de Montellano et al. continues the case against Africa-Americas contacts. Other prominent Mesoamerican specialists such as UC Riverside anthropology professor Karl Taube are confident that "There simply is no material evidence of any Pre-Hispanic contact between the Old World and Mesoamerica before the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century". A BBC article titled "Africa's greatest explorer" summarizes the controversy from the perspectives of the scholars and historians in Mali.
