Songhai outgrew Mali then fell to Moroccan guns
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Songhai Empire dominated the western Sahel and ranked among Africa’s largest states. Sonni Ali conquered, Askia Muhammad organised and built schools, and Gao grew rich on Saharan trade, until a Moroccan army crossed the desert in 1590 and shattered the realm.
Songhai identity fused Sorko fishers, Do farmers, and horse-riding Songhai speakers around ancient Kukiya, and tombstones in the Saney cemetery near Gao name kings of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Mali seized prosperous Gao around 1300 and taxed it for decades, but after Mansa Sulayman’s death in 1360 succession fights weakened Mali and Songhai reasserted itself.
Sonni Ali (1464–1492) outgrew Mali in territory and took Timbuktu in 1468. Muslim chroniclers such as Mahmud Kati and al-Sa’di painted him as a tyrant who burned the town; as he approached, the official Akilu gathered a thousand camels to carry the scholars of Sankore away to Walata. Control of such trade cities nonetheless made Songhai richer than Mali had ever been.
General Muhammad Ture overthrew Sonni Ali’s heir and, as Askia the Great, kept a full-time army, separated soldiers from civilians, and built a bureaucracy for taxes and justice. He dug canals, standardised weights and measures, brought the Taghaza salt mines inside the frontier, made the hajj, recruited teachers from Egypt and Morocco for Sankore, and encouraged astronomers. He fought the Mossi without forcing them to convert.
In 1528 his own children rebelled and crowned Askia Musa, whose fall in 1531 opened a long slide; Askia Ishaq I’s reign saw civil strife, and Askia Daoud’s death in 1583 split the realm into feuding camps. Morocco, near bankruptcy after defeating Portugal at Alcácer Quibir, looked to the gold and salt routes, and Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur sent Judar Pasha across the Sahara.
Source: Songhai Empire
