Songhai Empire

A ribbon along a river

Drafted from Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (2018)formation

Songhai is the third empire of the middle Niger and the last, and the thing that distinguishes it from the two before it is a fleet.

Gao sits on the Niger about five hundred kilometres downstream of Timbuktu, and the Songhai were river people — fishers, boatmen, traders along a waterway navigable for something like sixteen hundred kilometres of its middle course. The empire that grew out of Gao ran along that river rather than out from a centre, and it was held together by an inland navy under an officer the chronicles call the hi-koi, the master of the water.

Very few states anywhere are shaped that way. The Niger empires are usually described as a sequence — Ghana, then Mali, then Songhai — as though they were the same state under different management, and the first two were built on the trade routes crossing the river while this one was built on the river itself.

What it inherited

A great deal.

Gao had been a Malian province in the fourteenth century. When Mali's frontier gave way — Mali lost Timbuktu in 1433, when Tuareg took Timbuktu — Songhai was the power that filled the space, and it inherited the two things the region ran on: the trans-Saharan routes at their southern terminus, and the towns.

The towns matter more than the routes for what can now be said about the empire. Timbuktu and Jenne were not merely markets. They held mosques, madrasas, a book trade, a jurist class, and a body of Arabic literacy that had been accumulating for two centuries, and the whole of the empire's surviving narrative comes from that class writing about the empire two generations after it ended.

Two audiences again

The Mali record in this region observes that its dynasty maintained two genealogies for two audiences — one held by hereditary praise-singers, one written in Arabic for Cairo and Fez.

Songhai has the same split in a sharper form and it runs through the whole record. The founder of the empire, Sunni Ali, is a hero in Songhai oral tradition and a tyrant and unbeliever in the Timbuktu chronicles. The man who overthrew his son is a usurper in the first and the restorer of Islam in the second.

Both accounts are about the same twenty years, and the sources here are the chronicles, because the chronicles are what was written down. The fifth chapter is about what that costs.

Sunni Ali

Drafted from Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (1999)expansion

Sunni Ali ruled from 1464 to 1492 and made the empire. He took Timbuktu in 1468 and Jenne in 1473 — the two cities that made the middle Niger the intellectual centre of West Africa — pushed the Tuareg back into the desert, campaigned against the Mossi in the south, and built the river fleet the empire ran on.

He is also, in the only narrative sources that survive, a monster.

The chronicles' verdict

The Ta'rikh al-Sudan and the Ta'rikh al-Fattash were compiled at Timbuktu in the seventeenth century by men descended from the scholarly families Sunni Ali had persecuted, and they do not moderate it. He is a tyrant, a shedder of blood, a man who killed so many of the learned that God would not forgive him, and a Muslim only in name — praying without ablution, combining the prayers, mixing Islam with the practices of the ancestral religion.

Some of this is checkable and some of it is a genre. What is not disputed is that he took Timbuktu by force from the Tuareg, treated its jurists as a hostile faction rather than as an asset, killed a number of them and drove others to Walata, and governed for twenty-eight years without seeking the approval of anybody in Cairo.

The other tradition

Songhai oral tradition remembers him differently: as the founder, a figure of enormous power, and a man of the river.

His successors ruled on a caliphal investiture and on conquest, and both values belong to his successor rather than to him. There is no coded and there is no way to name what Sunni Ali actually ruled on — the assent of a Songhai military aristocracy and a religious authority the chronicles will only describe as sorcery.

It is a particular kind of gap and it recurs wherever a state's own tradition was oral and its chroniclers were hostile. The Median record says it is disputed whether there was a state to have institutions. The Mitanni record has one coded field because nobody has found the capital. Here the polity is not in doubt and the description of it is monopolised by people who found its founder's religion illegitimate, so the field records the successor's arrangements and not the founder's.

Why the successor's version won

Because the successor's people wrote.

Askia Muhammad, the general who overthrew Sunni Ali's son a year after his death, rebuilt the alliance with the Timbuktu scholars and went to Cairo for a title. The consequence is that the empire's founder is described by the beneficiaries of the coup that displaced his line, and the man who took the throne by force is the one the sources call the restorer of Islam.

The chapter on the chronicles is about that problem directly. It is worth noticing here that the problem is not that the chronicles are unreliable. They are careful, detailed and often checkable. It is that they are the only voice, and they belonged to one party in a quarrel the empire's first two reigns were about.

Divide that among yourselves

Drafted from al-Sadi, Tarikh es-Soudan (1900)expansion

The chronicle that preserves the Songhai empire's history was written in Timbuktu in the 1650s by a scholar of the city, and its chapter on the man who built the empire opens like this, in Houdas's French:

As for that master tyrant, that famous scoundrel, Sonni Ali … he was a man endowed with great strength and powerful energy. Wicked, libertine, unjust, oppressive, bloodthirsty, he put to death such a quantity of men that God alone knows the number. He persecuted the learned and the pious, attacking their lives, their honour or their standing.

Es-Sa'di goes on in that register for a chapter. Then, without changing tone, he records that Sonni Ali reigned twenty-seven or twenty-eight years, spent them in campaigns and conquests, took Jenne and stayed a year and a month, conquered Bara and the country of the Sanhaja, took Timbuktu and every mountain stronghold but one.

Why the chronicler hates him

Because of who was writing. Es-Sa'di was a Timbuktu jurist from a Timbuktu family, and the ulama of Timbuktu were the people Sonni Ali had destroyed.

The chronicle is specific. He hastened to kill or humiliate every scholar who had stayed in the city, giving as his pretext that they were friends and courtiers of the Tuareg and that this was why he was angry with them. He imprisoned the mother of one jurist and had her two brothers, both jurists, put to death. In short, he did not cease to inflict miseries upon miseries and humiliations upon humiliations on all the learned. One day he ordered thirty virgins, daughters of scholars, brought to him as concubines, and being at the river port at the time, required them to make the journey on foot.

Es-Sa'di's parenthesis after that catalogue — God preserve us from such a fate! — is the voice of a man writing about his own professional ancestors.

The two anecdotes

The chronicle's charge of impiety is not a general accusation. It is two stories, and they are better than any denunciation.

The first is about prayer. Sonni Ali would put off his five daily prayers until the night or the next day, and then perform them all at once, sitting down, going through the gestures several times over and naming each prayer in turn as he went. Then he gave a single closing salutation for the lot and said:

Now divide all that among yourselves, since you know one another well.

The second is about killing. He would order a man's death — even one of the men he most valued — for no motive and no necessity whatever; and afterwards he sometimes repented. His servants, knowing this, took to hiding anyone whose execution seemed likely to be regretted. When the regret appeared they would tell him: we have spared him, he is not dead. And he was delighted.

Es-Sa'di names the servant who did this most often. It was Askia Muhammad — the commander who overthrew Sonni Ali's son the year after he died, took the throne, went on pilgrimage, was invested by the sharif of Mecca, and restored the scholars of Timbuktu to everything they had lost.

What the chronicle is

That last detail is the reason to read the chapter as a document rather than as a verdict.

Es-Sa'di is writing a hundred and fifty years after the events, in a city under Moroccan occupation, in a scholarly tradition whose founding grievance is what Sonni Ali did to it and whose founding benefactor is the man who replaced him. The portrait of a blasphemous, capricious murderer and the portrait of his pious secretary saving lives behind his back are the same story told from one side.

What it cannot hide, because the chronicler is honest about the facts even when he is not neutral about the man, is that the tyrant took Jenne and Timbuktu and the river and built the largest state West Africa had yet seen, and that the scholars' hero inherited it from him.

A caliph of Takrur

Drafted from Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (1999)peak

In 1493 a general named Muhammad Ture overthrew Sunni Ali's son, took the title askia, and founded a dynasty. In 1496 he set out for Mecca.

It was the second great pilgrimage out of the Niger bend. Mansa Musa's has Mansa Musa's of 1324 — and the two are usually told as the same story about West African gold arriving in Egypt. They were not doing the same thing.

What he came back with

An appointment.

At Cairo, Askia Muhammad obtained from the Abbasid caliph — the shadow caliph in Mamluk keeping — the shadow Abbasid caliphate of Cairo — designation as khalifa of the land of Takrur. He also acquired, on the chronicles' account, a cap and a sword as the insignia of it, and the counsel of the Egyptian jurist al-Suyuti.

The investiture is the point, and the pairing is the whole of the man's position. He had taken the throne by beating the previous dynasty's heir in the field, which is the second value and was not a claim anybody could build on. What he went to Cairo for was the first.

The Abbasid caliph at Cairo had no army, no territory and no power of any kind; the transaction was entirely standardised — a diploma, a robing, a public reading — and the office conferring it had held no power of any kind for two hundred and fifty years. What made it worth having was not that the caliph could do anything. It was that everybody in the Islamic world agreed he was the caliph.

Askia Muhammad crossed the Sahara twice to get one.

What it bought at home

Legitimacy against the men he had displaced, and an alliance with the scholars his predecessor had persecuted.

Sunni Ali had treated the Timbuktu jurists as a political faction — killed some, driven others to Walata, and by the chronicles' account never pretended to be anything other than hostile. Askia Muhammad recalled them, endowed them, appointed their leading families to judgeships, and applied the law visibly.

The chronicles that damn the founder of the empire celebrate the man who overthrew his son, and they were written by the descendants of the people on the receiving end of both policies. That bias is worth flagging before the admiration in them is taken at face value.

And what it did not fix

The succession.

Askia Muhammad ruled thirty-five years, went blind, and was deposed in 1528 by his own son, who put him on an island in the Niger where he spent nine years before another son brought him back to die in Gao. That son had already been deposed by a brother.

Nobody ever wrote down how the throne was supposed to pass, and what followed was close to a coup a decade for the rest of the century. A caliphal title obtained from Cairo settled the dynasty's standing against outsiders and settled nothing at all inside the family.

Books were worth more

Drafted from Africanus, The History and Description of Africa (1896)peak

Around 1510 a young Granada-born Moroccan travelled to Timbuktu, and about fifteen years later, having been captured by corsairs and presented to the pope, wrote down what he had seen. Leo Africanus is the only outsider who described Songhai at its height.

The city he found was not built of stone. The houses, he says, are cottages of chalk thatched with straw. But there is a stately temple with walls of stone and lime, and a princely palace built by a most excellent workeman of Granada — which is to say by a Spanish Muslim architect, brought fifteen hundred miles south across the desert to build for an African king.

There are shops of artificers and merchants, and especially of weavers of linen and cotton. The women, except maidservants, go veiled and sell all the food. Corn, cattle, milk and butter are plentiful. Salt is not: it comes five hundred miles overland from Taghaza, and Leo saw a single camel-load sold for eighty ducats.

The court

The king had gold sceptres and plate, some pieces of which Leo says weighed thirteen hundred pounds — a figure to be read as a great deal rather than weighed.

He kept three thousand horsemen and a large number of footmen with poisoned arrows. He rode a camel, led by one of his noblemen, while his soldiers rode horses. When merchants arrived in town with horses for sale, the king had a number brought before him, chose the best for himself, and paid, Leo says, a most liberal price.

And the protocol, which is the passage most often quoted:

Whosoeuer will speake vnto this king must first fall downe before his feete, & then taking vp earth must sprinkle it vpon his owne head & shoulders.

Ibn Battuta had described the same ceremony at the Malian court a hundred and sixty years earlier and disapproved of it. Leo reports it without comment, as one of the customs of the place, observed by everybody who had not saluted the king before and by ambassadors from other princes.

Where the money went

Two sentences of Leo's have carried the reputation of Timbuktu for five hundred years, and they are worth quoting exactly:

Here are great store of doctors, iudges, priests, and other learned men, that are bountifully maintained at the kings cost and charges. And hither are brought diuers manuscripts or written bookes out of Barbarie, which are sold for more money than any other merchandize.

Books were the most profitable thing to carry to Timbuktu. Not salt, which came five hundred miles and sold for eighty ducats a camel-load; not cloth; not horses. Manuscripts, imported from north Africa, into a city on the edge of the Sahara, bought by scholars whose salaries the king was paying.

That is a description of a state deliberately buying an intellectual establishment, and it says more about what the Askias thought they were doing than any amount of campaign narrative.

The other side of the same page

Leo does not soften what paid for it, and the sentence sits four lines above the one about the books.

The king's forces, he says, have frequent skirmishes with those who refuse to pay tribute — and so many as they take, they sell vnto the merchants of Tombuto.

Captives taken from tributaries who had not paid were sold in the market of the city whose scholars were being maintained at the king's expense. Both facts are in the same paragraph of the same account by the same man, and any description of this empire that keeps one and drops the other is not describing it.

The estates

Drafted from Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (1999)peak

Songhai taxed the Saharan trade and took tribute from its provinces, and the chronicles are more specific about a third source of income than about either of those: the royal estates.

The Ta'rikh al-Fattash describes agricultural establishments along the Niger worked by settled slaves — communities with a name, a headman, a fixed obligation in sacks of grain, and in some accounts hundreds of workers on a single estate. They fed the court, the army and the towns. And they were hereditary: the people on them were slaves by descent, in categories the chronicles name, and were not manumitted in the ordinary way.

This is not taxation. A state taxing agriculture stands outside the farm and takes a share; this was direct production on crown land by an unfree workforce, which is closer to the state agriculture of Ur III or the fortress estates of Urartu than to anything the word tax describes.

What it rested on

The Niger empires ran on slavery, and it is worth stating plainly because the older literature did not.

Slaves worked the estates. Slaves fought in the armies — Mali's rulers had already found that free troops came through intermediaries who could withhold them, and a purchased soldiery could not be withheld. Slaves staffed the households. And slaves moved north across the Sahara as the region's oldest export, for a thousand years before the Atlantic trade and alongside it afterwards.

Gomez's argument is that the categories of caste, servility and descent that West Africa carried into the modern period were formed here, in this period, and not by later European contact. Whether or not one follows him the whole way, the alternative is an account of these empires that leaves out most of the people who lived in them.

The other side of the same century

None of it made the state weak, which a modern reader may half expect.

Songhai in the middle of the sixteenth century was the largest polity West Africa had produced — some eight hundred thousand square kilometres — with a river fleet, a working judiciary in the towns, a class of jurists corresponding with Cairo and Fez, and a book trade substantial enough that the Ta'rikh al-Sudan mentions a scholar's library of sixteen hundred volumes.

It was destroyed in an afternoon by four thousand men with guns.

The succession nobody wrote down

Drafted from Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (1999)contraction

Songhai lasted a hundred and twenty years as an empire and spent most of them having a succession crisis.

Askia Muhammad, who had taken the throne by overthrowing Sunni Ali's son, ruled thirty-five years, went blind, and was deposed in 1528 by a son of his own, who put him on an island in the Niger. He was there nine years. Another son brought him back to Gao to die; that son had already deposed the first one.

What follows is close to a coup a decade for the rest of the century. Brothers deposed brothers, sons deposed fathers, and the askiyas were made and unmade by factions of the military and court aristocracy who had learned exactly how it was done, because Askia Muhammad had shown them.

Why there was no rule

Nobody ever wrote one down, and by the time it mattered there were two competing principles in the field and no way to choose between them.

The dynasty was a usurping one. Askia Muhammad had taken the throne on a caliphal investiture and a religious argument against his predecessor, not on descent, and a dynasty founded that way cannot easily insist that descent is binding on everybody else. Meanwhile the older Songhai political tradition, which was oral and which the Timbuktu chroniclers had no interest in recording, presumably had arrangements of its own that the Askias had overridden.

So the empire's own historians, who were Muslim jurists in Timbuktu writing about a court in Gao, record the coups without ever stating what the coups were violations of.

1588

The one that mattered came three years before the Moroccans did.

A disputed succession turned into open civil war between factions of the army, fought in the field, with substantial casualties among exactly the cavalry that would be needed shortly afterwards. The winner took the throne as Askia Ishaq II.

Three years later he was at Tondibi, with an army that had been fighting itself in living memory, against four thousand men who had crossed the Sahara with firearms.

What the pattern cost

It is easy to overstate this and worth stating carefully.

Songhai was not weak in 1591. It was the largest state in West Africa, it had just fought a civil war and reunified, and it outnumbered the Moroccan force several times over. A stable succession would not have supplied it with arquebuses, which is what it actually needed.

What the succession pattern did cost was time and attention over sixty years — sixty years in which the Saadis were arming with Ottoman muskets and a Songhai court was preoccupied with which brother would rule. Morocco had asked for the salt mines at Taghaza repeatedly and been refused; the possibility of a crossing was not a secret; and nobody in Gao appears to have done anything about firearms.

The empire did not fall because of the coups. It fell because it was busy.

Written from Timbuktu

Drafted from Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (1999)aside?What aside means

Two Arabic chronicles compiled at Timbuktu in the seventeenth century, the Ta'rikh al-Sudan and the Ta'rikh al-Fattash, are the main narrative sources for Songhai. They were written by members of the scholarly families of the city, after the empire had been destroyed, and they carry that position throughout.

Sunni Ali, who took Timbuktu in 1468 and treated its scholars harshly, is remembered in them as a tyrant and a doubtful Muslim. Askia Muhammad, who overthrew Sunni Ali's son, made the pilgrimage and patronised the same scholarly families, is remembered as the model Muslim ruler. Both judgements come from the constituency each ruler treated differently, and modern work reads Sunni Ali rather more sympathetically as a ruler balancing an urban Islamic elite against a rural population whose practice was not theirs.

It is the oldest source problem there is: the surviving account is written by a group with a stake in it, after the fact, and there is nothing to check it against.

What makes this case unusually clean is that the men writing were not the victors. They had lost. The Moroccan conquest of 1591 had put a foreign garrison in their city and destroyed the state they had served, and both chronicles were written under that occupation by people describing a world that had stopped inside their own lifetimes.

Tondibi

Drafted from Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (1999)end

In 1591 a Moroccan expeditionary force crossed the Sahara — something in the order of four thousand men, with pack animals, a train, and firearms — and met the Songhai army at Tondibi north of Gao.

The Songhai force was many times larger. It had cavalry, infantry and, by the chronicles' account, a herd of cattle driven at the Moroccan line to break it. The cattle turned when the guns went off and went back through their own army.

The battle lasted a short time. Gao and Timbuktu fell within weeks.

The clearest gunpowder case there is

Most of the famous gunpowder battles of the sixteenth century are less decisive than they look. At Chaldiran in 1514 the Ottoman guns mattered less than Ottoman infantry discipline; at Panipat in 1526 the artillery was one factor among several, and the numbers were not wildly unequal in either.

Here a force outnumbered several times over crossed sixteen hundred kilometres of desert, arrived depleted and sick, and won in an afternoon. Every account from both sides says the same thing about why. The Songhai cavalry had never faced massed firearms; the horses would not stand it; and no amount of numbers or courage substituted for a weapon the other side had and this side did not.

What Morocco got

Not an empire. A garrison.

The Saadi state could not administer the middle Niger from Marrakesh across the Sahara, and within a generation the expeditionary force and its descendants — the Arma — were an autonomous military caste governing the towns on their own account and paying Morocco nothing. They made no claim on Songhai's legitimacy of any kind: they held the towns as an occupying garrison and said so, which is unusual, since a conqueror who intends to stay almost always finds a reason why he is the rightful heir.

What the conquest destroyed was the thing that had made the region legible to the rest of the world: the empire that guaranteed the roads, the courts that applied a known law, and the scholarly establishment that wrote in a language Cairo could read. Ahmad Baba, the most eminent Timbuktu jurist of the period, was arrested, his library confiscated, and he was deported to Marrakesh, where he spent twelve years and wrote — among other things — a treatise on the legality of enslaving West Africans, arguing against much of what was being done.

The end of a system, not a state

Songhai is unusual among the African empires in having an ending anybody can date: a battle, a day, a named enemy, and accounts from both sides. Ghana, Mali, Aksum, Kush and Kanem all end in slow contractions nobody recorded, because there was nobody outside with an interest in writing it down. Songhai ends precisely because the power that ended it came from the other side of the Sahara and kept records.

What ended with it was larger than the polity. The trans-Saharan trade system had been running for something like eight hundred years and had supported three successive empires; by 1591 the Atlantic had already begun taking the gold west to European ships, and the Moroccan conquest removed the political structure that had held the southern end of the old system together. There was no fourth empire of the Niger.

The two Timbuktu chronicles that supply almost everything anybody knows about this empire were written in the decades afterwards, by men living under the Arma, describing a world that had stopped within their own memory. Nearly all of what can be said about Songhai is therefore said in the register of elegy, by people who had watched it end.

The Arma

Drafted from Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (1999)afterlife

Morocco won at Tondibi and could not keep what it had won, and what happened next is a demonstration of why crossing a desert to conquer somebody is a bad idea even when it works.

The expeditionary force could not be supplied from Marrakesh. Sixteen hundred kilometres of Sahara is not a line of communication; it is an obstacle that happens to be crossable. Reinforcements arrived at intervals and then stopped arriving. Within a generation the soldiers and their descendants — the Arma, from the Arabic for musketeers — had married locally, stopped remitting anything to Morocco, and become an autonomous military caste governing Timbuktu, Gao and Djenné on their own account.

They ruled for two hundred years, as a pashalik in name and a self-perpetuating garrison in fact, electing and deposing their own pashas at a rate that makes the Askias look stable.

What they did not do

They made no claim on Songhai at all.

No Arma pasha called himself Askia, invoked the dynasty, married into it, or argued that he was continuing anything. They held the towns as an occupying force descended from an occupying force, and their own descendants remembered themselves as Moroccans for generations after Morocco had forgotten them.

That is genuinely unusual. A conqueror who intends to stay almost always finds a reason why he is the rightful heir — it is cheaper than governing by force forever. The Arma did not bother, and the reason is probably that they never thought of themselves as ruling a country. They were holding three towns on a river, which is what they went on doing until the Bambara and then the Fulani jihads reduced them.

Ahmad Baba

The most eminent jurist of Timbuktu was arrested after the conquest, his library was confiscated, and he was deported across the desert to Marrakesh, where he spent twelve years.

He said afterwards that his own library — the smallest, he claimed, of any of his family's — had held sixteen hundred volumes.

While in Morocco he wrote, among a great deal else, a treatise on the legality of enslaving West Africans, arguing that a person's origin does not make him enslavable and that unbelief is the only ground the law allows — which meant that the Muslims of the Niger bend, whoever else might be taken, could not lawfully be. He was writing in the country whose army had just conquered his.

And the chronicles

The two great Timbuktu chronicles were written under the Arma, by men who had watched the empire end.

Everything anybody can say about Songhai — the reigns, the campaigns, the administration, Sunni Ali's atrocities and Askia Muhammad's pilgrimage — comes out of two books composed in a defeated city, under a foreign garrison, by scholars from the class that had been the empire's judiciary and had every reason to remember it as better than what replaced it.

That is not a reason to discard them. It is a reason to read them as what they are, which is what men write when the thing they belonged to has just stopped and they are the only ones left who remember how it worked.

There was no fourth empire on the Niger. The trans-Saharan system that had carried three of them was already being undercut by ships on the Atlantic coast, and after 1591 there was no political structure holding its southern end together. What the Arma inherited was three towns on a river that no longer led anywhere important.