Songhai Empire

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The Niger does not run the way a river is supposed to. It rises within a few hundred kilometers of the Atlantic, then turns its back on the ocean and drives northeast into the Sahara, swinging through a great bend before bowing south again toward the forest. At the top of that bend, where the desert leans down to drink, sits Gao — and a people who took the river itself as the spine of an empire. The Songhai built the largest state West Africa had ever carried: a polity that at its height ran some eight hundred thousand square kilometers along the middle Niger, from the salt pans of the deep Sahara to the gold-bearing south, gathering into one administration the river-port at Gao, the scholar-city of Timbuktu, and the brick metropolis of Djenne. For a little over a century the imperial order of the Western Sudan was theirs to keep.

The Songhai Empire at its height, stretching along the great bend of the Niger from the Sahara to the savanna. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

The river and the break from Mali

Songhai began small. Fishermen, boatmen, and horse-soldiers of the middle Niger, the Songhai-speaking peoples held the country around Gao under the early kings the chronicles name Za, or Zuwa — a dynasty old enough that its founding sat already in legend by the time anyone wrote it down. Gao took up Islam early, by the eleventh century at least: the river-port stood on the southern shore of the trans-Saharan trade, where caravans coming down off the desert exchanged North African salt and goods for the gold, slaves, kola, and grain of the Sudan, and the merchants who carried that traffic carried the faith with it.

For a long span Gao lay within the reach of the Mali Empire, the Mande gold-power that succeeded Ghana as the master of the Western Sudan and at its fourteenth-century peak claimed the Niger bend as a province. Songhai paid tribute, sent hostages to the Malian court, and chafed. As Mali’s grip slackened — succession quarrels at the center, Tuareg pressure from the desert edge, Mossi raids from the south — the river-kingdom slipped its leash. The dynasty that emerged from this loosening was the Sunni (or Sonni) line, and under it Gao stopped being a vassal and started being a capital. The empire to come would be built on a paradox the Niger itself suggests: a desert-edge power whose roads were made of water, whose cavalry could be ferried where horses do not easily go, and whose wealth came from binding, by river, the same desert-and-savanna asymmetry that Ghana had first taxed by land — salt drawn south, gold drawn north, along a Niger that carried both.

Sonni Ali and the war on the water

The maker of the empire was Sonni Ali, remembered as Sonni Ali Ber — Ali the Great — fifteenth king of the Sunni line, who reigned from about 1464 to 1492. He inherited a kingdom that amounted to little more than the upper river around Gao and left an empire. The instrument was a war machine no one in the Western Sudan had assembled before: a standing river fleet of war-canoes that moved troops and supplies up and down the Niger at the speed of the current, paired with a striking cavalry drawn from the Songhai nobility. The combination let Sonni Ali appear suddenly, far from home, with force enough to take and hold cities.

He took the cities that mattered. In 1468 the Muslim notables of Timbuktu, who had suffered under the Tuareg overlords that seized the town as Malian authority withdrew, appealed to Gao for deliverance; Sonni Ali came, drove out the Tuareg, and made Timbuktu his. Djenne, the great walled trading city of the inland delta, was harder — the chronicles record a siege measured in years, ending in the town’s surrender around 1473. With Timbuktu, Djenne, the lakes of Massina, and the inner delta in hand, the Songhai held the commercial heart of the river and the customs revenue that flowed through it.

The man who did this is doubly remembered, and the two memories do not agree. To the Songhai tradition Sonni Ali was the founder-king, a sorcerer-warrior whose command over the unseen was as real as his command over the canoes — a sovereign who fused the older ritual authority of the river-kings with conquest. To the Sufi and juridical scholars of Timbuktu, whose hand later wrote the chronicles, he was a tyrant who harried the learned, a Muslim in name whose treatment of the ulama was an outrage. Both portraits are doing work; both come down through the same texts. What is not in dispute is the size of what he assembled. When he drowned in 1492, crossing a flooded stream on his way back from a campaign, the kingdom he handed on was an empire in everything but the manner of its rule.

The Askias and the turn to the book

Sonni Ali’s son Sonni Baru held the throne barely a year. In 1493 one of the dead king’s commanders, a soldier of the Soninke- or Mande-connected Ture family named Muhammad, broke the Sunni line by force of arms, defeated Baru, and took for himself a new title — Askia — that would name a dynasty. Muhammad Ture, known thereafter as Askia al-hajj Muhammad and to later memory as Askia the Great, reigned from 1493 to 1528 and gave Songhai the thing Sonni Ali had not: a state built to last past its conqueror.

The Tomb of Askia at Gao, the pyramidal mud-brick monument held to mark the burial of Askia Muhammad, raised at the close of the fifteenth century. — Taguelmoust, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Where the Sunni kingship had kept one foot in the ritual world of the river, the Askia kingship planted both in Islam, and used the faith as the mortar of administration. Askia Muhammad divided the sprawling empire into provinces under appointed governors, set a class of ministers over the affairs of the treasury, the army, the river fleet, the fields, and the forests, and made Quranic law the frame for the empire’s civil order. He drew the scholars he could not command by force into a partnership of legitimacy: the jurist gave the throne the sanction of religion, and the throne gave the jurist patronage, security, and a state run on terms he recognized.

The keystone of that partnership was the pilgrimage. Around 1496–1497 Askia Muhammad made the hajj to Mecca, traveling with an entourage the chronicles count in the hundreds of horsemen and a thousand foot, carrying gold reckoned in the hundreds of thousands of mithqals. In Cairo he was received by the sharif who held the shadow-caliphate of the Abbasids in Mamluk Egypt, and from that meeting he returned bearing a title no other Sudanese ruler claimed: caliph — deputy of the Commander of the Faithful over the lands of the Sudan. It was an investiture that placed his sovereignty inside the wider order of the Muslim world, a charter of authority brought home from the east. Where the Malian Mansa Musa’s celebrated hajj of 1324 had announced the gold of the Western Sudan to Cairo, Askia Muhammad’s came home with something else: a juridical mandate to rule as a Muslim sovereign.

To translate that mandate into governance, the Askia turned to the scholar Muhammad al-Maghili, a North African reformer of severe temper, and put to him a set of questions on how a king should order a Muslim realm — on taxation, on the treatment of nominal Muslims, on jihad against the unconverted, on the standing of the Saharan Jewish communities, whom al-Maghili’s hard answers condemned. Al-Maghili’s replies survive as a real document, one of the founding texts of statecraft in the Western Sudan: the working manual by which the Askia’s empire understood the relation of throne to law. Askia Muhammad ruled into old age and blindness, until three of his own sons deposed him in 1528; he died in 1538. The succession that followed was often violent, but the structure he laid down outlasted every quarrel over who would sit at its head.

Timbuktu, Djenne, and the trade in learning

Under the Askias the river-empire became, for a span, the most important center of Muslim scholarship south of the Sahara. The work was concentrated at Timbuktu, where three mosques — Djinguereber, Sidi Yahya, and above all Sankore — anchored a teaching tradition that ran on the Maliki school of law and reached out through the whole curriculum of the Islamic sciences: jurisprudence and Quranic exegesis, theology and grammar, logic, arithmetic, astronomy, and medicine. Sankore was not a university in the chartered European sense but a dense network of teaching circles around master-scholars, each gathering students who copied, memorized, and were licensed to transmit the texts in turn. The mosque’s sanctuary was rebuilt under the imam al-Aqib between 1578 and 1582, its court laid out, the tradition holds, to the measure of the Kaaba.

The Sankore Mosque at Timbuktu, the heart of the city’s teaching tradition under the Askia order. — Anne and David, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What made this possible was the same thing that made the empire: the trade. Salt came south in slabs from the desert mines, gold came north from the forest’s edge, and along the same roads moved a third commodity — books. Manuscripts were imported from Cairo, Fez, and the wider Islamic world, copied in the city’s scribal workshops, written fresh by its own scholars, and gathered into the private libraries of Timbuktu’s learned families, where a fine collection was a form of wealth and a mark of standing. The city’s scholarly dynasties — the Aqit, from whom Ahmad Baba descended, the Baghayogho, the Gidado — formed an elite as recognized as any merchant house. Djenne, downriver in the delta, was the southern pole of this learning, its own mosque-school feeding the network and its position athwart the gold roads making it, as the chronicles say, the city whose prosperity drew the merchants of the whole Sudan.

The Great Mosque of Djenne, the largest mud-brick building in the world, marking the southern pole of the river-empire’s learning and trade. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The greatest of the Timbuktu scholars under the Askia order was Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti (1556–1627), a jurist of the Aqit line who studied for more than a decade under the Juula master Muhammad Baghayogho al-Wangari and became the most prolific writer the city produced. His biographical dictionary of Maliki scholars, the Nayl al-Ibtihaj and its abridgment the Kifayat al-Muhtaj, cataloged the intellectual genealogy of the Maghrib and the Sudan and remains a primary record of West African learning. In his treatise Miʿraj al-Suʿud he turned the tools of Islamic jurisprudence against the slave trade that fed the same Saharan roads as the book trade, arguing that enslavability turned on unbelief and not on origin or color, and that to seize free-born Muslims was unlawful — a careful, learned dissent from inside the law itself.

Tondibi and the breaking of the order

The wealth that built the libraries was also a temptation, and it drew the eye of the north. The Saadian sultan of Morocco, Ahmad al-Mansur, flush after his victory over the Portuguese at the Battle of the Three Kings in 1578, set his sights across the Sahara on the gold and salt of the Niger. In October 1590 an army left Marrakesh under the command of Judar Pasha, a eunuch of Iberian origin, and made the brutal desert crossing — most of the men and animals that started did not finish — to reach the river early in 1591. What this force lacked in numbers it carried in fire: some four thousand soldiers, half of them émigrés from the fallen Muslim emirate of Granada and renegade gunners, equipped with arquebuses and cannon.

The Songhai met them on 13 March 1591 at Tondibi, on the plain just north of Gao, with an army the chronicles count in the tens of thousands under Askia Ishaq II — overwhelming in cavalry and foot, and armed, as the river-empire had always been, with spear and bow and sword. The Songhai opened by driving a herd of perhaps a thousand cattle at the Moroccan line to break it and screen the infantry’s advance. The plan died on contact with gunpowder: the crash of arquebus volleys and cannon turned the cattle in panic back upon the Songhai ranks, and the disciplined fire of the Andalusian gunners cut down the advancing infantry where the cavalry could not close. The battle is said to have lasted about two hours. It decided everything.

Judar marched on Gao and found it emptied and poor in plunder, then turned to the richer prizes — Timbuktu and Djenne — and sacked them in turn. The scholars who had made Timbuktu were the casualties of the peace: in 1593 the Moroccan authorities, suspecting the city’s notables of resistance, arrested its leading men and deported them across the desert to Marrakesh. Ahmad Baba went with them and spent more than a decade in exile, teaching and issuing rulings in the Saadian capital before he was allowed home in 1608. The libraries were scattered or hidden; the teaching network never fully reassembled.

The empire did not so much fall as come apart. The Askias and their loyalists withdrew downriver to Dendi, the Songhai heartland below the bend, and from there waged a guerrilla resistance against the invaders for decades — but they never again ruled the whole river. The Moroccans, for their part, could not hold what they had broken. Their soldiers settled into Timbuktu as a caste called the Arma, married into the local population, and within a generation slipped the control of distant Marrakesh, ruling a shrunken pashalik over the Niger ports as a law unto themselves. The single imperial authority that had bound salt to gold and the desert to the savanna along the great bend was gone, and with it the conditions that had made the river a road for armies and a road for books at once. Eastward, beyond the reach of the Niger fleets, the long-lived Kanem-Bornu state around Lake Chad weathered the same century intact, its own Saharan-Sudan corridor untouched by Saadian guns — but no comparable power rose again on the middle Niger. The trans-Saharan gold that had crowned a succession of Sudanic empires — Ghana, Mali, Songhai — would, within the century, begin to find new outlets on the Atlantic coast, where European ships had started to gather. The Niger kept running its strange course to the desert and back, but no power on its banks would gather the bend into one hand again.

The chronicles and the modern record

Songhai is known above all through two great Arabic chronicles written at Timbuktu in the seventeenth century, after the empire’s fall, by men formed in its scholarly tradition — the works modern scholarship groups as the Timbuktu tarikhs. The earlier in composition and the firmer in standing is the Taʾrikh al-Sudan of ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Saʿdi, completed about 1655, which carries the history of the Niger states from the rise of Songhai through the catastrophe of 1591 and on into the Moroccan pashalik to the chronicler’s own day. It is the single indispensable source for the empire, and reaches modern readers chiefly through John Hunwick’s annotated English edition, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (Brill, 1999), built on the Arabic text Octave Houdas first edited and translated into French at the turn of the twentieth century.

The second, the Taʾrikh al-fattash, is at once a major source and one of the most instructive puzzles in African historiography. Houdas and Maurice Delafosse published a critical edition in 1913 under the name of the sixteenth-century Timbuktu scholar Mahmud Kati, and for most of a century it was read as a near-contemporary witness to the Askia age. The text resisted that reading: it carried prophecies that conveniently foretold events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its manuscripts disagreed. Nehemia Levtzion argued in 1971 that the core chronicle was in fact the work of Kati’s grandson, Ibn al-Mukhtar, written soon after 1664. The fuller reckoning came from Mauro Nobili, whose study Towards a New Study of the So-Called Taʾrikh al-fattash showed that the document Europe had been reading as the Taʾrikh al-fattash was a nineteenth-century recomposition — a learned forgery assembled by Nuh b. al-Tahir to lend ancient warrant to the Massina state of his own day, stitched onto the genuine older chronicle of Ibn al-Mukhtar. The affair is a caution about how the Songhai past has been transmitted, and a reminder that the chronicles are themselves acts of statecraft, written to make and unmake legitimacy.

Astronomical tables in a manuscript held at Timbuktu, copying the work of the tenth-century Egyptian astronomer Ibn Yunus — part of the city’s surviving scholarly heritage. — via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain Mark 1.0)

Beyond the tarikhs, the empire is read through Hunwick’s edition of al-Maghili’s Replies, Shariʿa in Songhay (Oxford for the British Academy, 1985), which preserves the founding constitutional dialogue of the Askia state; through the surviving manuscript heritage of Timbuktu, whose hundreds of thousands of leaves of jurisprudence, theology, astronomy, and correspondence are the material residue of the scholarly economy described above; and through the standing monuments of the river — the pyramidal Tomb of Askia at Gao, raised at the close of the fifteenth century and held to mark the burial of Askia Muhammad himself, and the great mud-brick mosques of Timbuktu and Djenne that the empire’s wealth maintained.

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