Songhai Empire

Overview

The Songhai Empire was the dominant state of the western Sahel in the 15th–16th centuries, centred on the Niger Bend with its capital at Gao. At its peak it was one of the largest empires in African history—contemporaneous sources credit it with some 1.4 million km² in 1528—spanning much of modern Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Mauritania and beyond, and surpassing its predecessor Mali in area, wealth and power.

History

A Songhai state existed at Gao from at least the 11th century, ruled by the Za and then Sonni dynasties, before Mali conquered the city around 1300. As Mali disintegrated after 1360, Songhai reasserted independence in the 1430s. The imperial era opened with Sonni Ali (r. 1464–1492), a brilliant and ruthless cavalry commander who took Timbuktu in 1468, starved Djenné into surrender in 1473 after a seven-year siege, repelled the Mossi and conquered the Dogon. Though Muslim, he favoured traditional religion and persecuted Timbuktu's Tuareg-linked scholars, earning a tyrant's reputation in the Islamic chronicles.

His son Sonni Baru was overthrown in 1493 by the general Muhammad Ture, Askia the Great, who founded the Askia dynasty (1493–1591). Askia reorganised the empire into provinces under appointed governors, created a professional army and a Niger navy under an admiral (hikoy), standardised weights and measures, and built a centralised bureaucracy of ministers for finance, agriculture and justice under qadis applying Sharia. His lavish 1496–97 hajj—reportedly 500 cavalry, 1,000 infantry and 300,000 pieces of gold—proclaimed Songhai's wealth across the Muslim world. Under him and the capable Askia Daoud (r. 1549–1582) Timbuktu became a renowned centre of learning, its Sankore scholars drawn from Egypt and Morocco; the salt mines of Taghaza were annexed, and the gold-salt trans-Saharan trade, supplemented by ivory, kola and slaves, underpinned the economy. Society was clan- and caste-ordered, with craft guilds and extensive slave agriculture.

Decline and legacy

After Daoud's death in 1582, succession wars fatally weakened the empire. In 1590 Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur of Saadi Morocco, coveting the gold trade, sent Judar Pasha across the Sahara with some 4,000 men armed with arquebuses and English cannon. At the Battle of Tondibi (12 March 1591) the vastly larger Songhai host of Askia Ishaq II was routed, its ranks broken by gunfire and a cattle stampede. The Moroccans sacked Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné but could not govern so vast a space: the empire splintered, the Askias retreated south to found the Dendi Kingdom (whose line survived until the French deposed its last ruler in 1901), and Morocco's Pashalik of Timbuktu eventually went its own way. Songhai's fall ended the great age of the West African Sahelian empires and shifted regional power decisively southward.