Before Gao became Gao, there was Kukiya, a name that is quietly passed over in most popular history books and yet is indispensable, for without Kukiya, Gao cannot be understood.
Kukiya is regarded by tradition as the original seat of the Za dynasty, the earliest rulers of what would later be called the Songhay region, and the town lay near the present-day village of Bentiya on the eastern bank of the Niger, about 134 kilometres southeast of Gao.
There, on that bank, the Sorko, the Gow and the Gabibi first found their way to cooperation, when the fishermen, the hunters and the farmers discovered that their specializations needed one another. Out of that cooperation grew a political structure, and out of that structure an administrative centre, and out of that centre eventually a desire for a larger, more strategic capital, and that capital became Gao.
Two Cities, One Power
Gao was not one city but two, for by the tenth century the capital consisted of two settlements, each with its own function. Gao-Ancien was the royal residence, the seat of power, while Gao-Saney was the commercial centre, the place where the traders built their warehouses and the markets ran.
The geographer al-Muhallabi ﵀, who died in 990 of the Christian era, described it even then: he spoke of a ruler who lived on the west bank, surrounded by his confidants, while on the opposite side lay the markets and trading houses to which people came from all directions.
What al-Muhallabi ﵀ Saw
Our oldest Arabic description of Gao comes from al-Muhallabi ﵀, a geographer who wrote in the tenth century and died in 990 of the common era.
He described a great city on a river, with two settlements separated from each other by the stream, on one bank the king and his court, on the other bank the markets and the traders. The king, he wrote, was a Muslim, or would become one, and his palace stood apart from the ordinary population.
What al-Muhallabi ﵀ knew, in his study in the Abbasid empire, about a city in the Sahel, he knew because the traders who crossed the Sahara brought their eyes with them, for in the markets of Sijilmasa and Tahert they told of what they had seen, while scholars wrote it down and other scholars read those notes and built new accounts upon them.
Fourteen Kings Before Islam
Our most important written source for early Gao is the chronicles of Timbuktu, and the Tarikh as-Sudan, written by al-Sa’di ﵀ around 1655, contains a king list of the Za dynasty that reaches back to the legendary founder Za Alayaman. According to this tradition the first fourteen kings ruled from Kukiya, and the chronicler, himself a Muslim, calls them jahiliyyah: those who lived in ignorance, that is to say, before Islam.
This is a remarkable choice of words, for with this one word al-Sa’di ﵀ acknowledges that a fully fledged political order existed in Gao before Islam arrived, an order with a legitimacy of its own, a continuity of its own and a line of kings of its own who did not appear out of nothing on the day a trader from Sijilmasa moored at the bank with the first stories of the Prophet.
The kings belonged to a dynasty called the Qanda and bore the title Za, and their power rested on cavalry and camel riders. They were probably originally established downstream in Kukiya and moved their seat to Gao only in the early tenth century: fourteen rulers, an unbroken line of governance, a capital that shifted along with the trade.
The Voice of the Soil
What archaeology draws not from books but from the earth itself fills the gap that the written sources leave behind.
At Gao-Saney, glass beads have been found originating from Egypt, pottery from the Maghreb and traces of Arabic script on tombstones, an indication that the Islamic community in the city was older than previously thought. On one stone the name Abu Bakr Muhammad bin 'Abdullah can be read, with a date that falls in the eleventh century: a trader, or a scholar, who died and was buried in this city far from the places where his ancestors rest.
There are traces of copper and remains that point to imports from as far away as Mesopotamia, and coins from the Aghlabid era, struck in Tunis and Ifriqiya, found their way along the caravan routes to this city on the Niger. Every shard tells the same story from a different angle, for Gao was not an isolated settlement but a junction.
Gao as a Model for the Sahel
What makes Gao special is that it was not simply a city but a prototype.
It was the first urban settlement in West Africa to be described in external sources as the capital of a great kingdom that could rival Wagadou, the ancient Ghana empire, and for centuries the city held a strategic position in the political and cultural landscape of West Africa, a cosmopolitan centre populated by traders, scholars and warrior elites from a region that stretched from the Atlantic coast to Lake Chad.
Three elements came together in Gao in a way that was rare elsewhere.
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Water and food: the Niger provided fish, irrigation and fertile banks, and the communities of Sorko, Gow and Gabibi had already developed a system of specialized food production that supported a larger population than farming or fishing alone could ever have done.
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Position: Gao was one of the earliest sites of significant trans-Saharan trade in the eighth century, earlier than researchers long assumed, and caravans from Egypt, from the Maghreb and from the central Sahara came together at this one bend in the river.
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Governance: the Za dynasty developed a model in which political power in Gao-Ancien remained separate from commercial activity in Gao-Saney, and that separation was not a weakness but a strength, for the king ruled and the market traded, and each kept its own space.
What al-Sa’di ﵀ Recounts
Al-Sa’di ﵀, writing in the seventeenth century on the basis of oral traditions, gives us the most detailed description of the early Zuwa kings, for he lists thirty-two rulers and states that in 1009 or 1010 of the common era the fifteenth ruler, Zuwa Kusoy, was the first to accept Islam.
Fourteen kings before him had ruled without Islam, fourteen generations of governance, legal order, tax collection, diplomacy and trade, and that is not a footnote to the Islamic history of West Africa but the foundation on which that history is built. The Tarikh al-Fattash adds that in the tenth century Gao was situated on the west bank of the Niger, on the Gourma side of the river, and although scholars still debate the precise locations and the order of dynasties, the continuity is certain: Gao was a stable political centre for generations before Islam would renew its character.
The Network Beyond the City
What archaeology further adds to this picture is what has been found at the surface in the outskirts of Gao-Saney.
Glass beads from Egypt, pottery from the Maghreb, traces of copper and remains that point to imports from as far away as Mesopotamia, and alongside these, coins from the Aghlabid era, struck in Tunis and Ifriqiya, which found their way along the caravan routes to this city on the Niger.
As far as the archaeologist’s eye reaches, so far reached the network of Gao, and it ran in two directions, for what came in here was not only luxury goods for the king but also implements, tools and raw materials for the smiths and potters of Gao-Saney itself, while what left here was not raw material but finished products, forged or shaped by craftsmen who had learned their trade from generation to generation.
A city-state is not merely a palace with some huts around it, but a network of workshops, markets, schools, houses of worship and government buildings, brought together by a common political order, and Gao was that already in the tenth century.
Whoever stood at the landing place of Gao saw the whole Sahel pass by: black Soninke traders in long robes, Imazighen guides with their litham around mouth and nose, Songhai fishermen unloading their catch, and scholars who had come from Sijilmasa and travelled on again to the city mosque for prayer.
Above all this, on the south bank, stood the palace, while under the trees on the north bank stood the trading houses, and between the two banks the traffic of the river glided day and night, as calm and as inexorable as the current itself.
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A City That Connected the World
Centuries later a Moroccan judge and traveller would see with his own eyes what Gao had become.
Ibn Battuta ﵀ visited Gao in 1353, when the city fell under the authority of the Mali empire, and he described it as a great city on the Niger, one of the finest and most fertile of the Sahel, with rice, milk, chickens, fish and cucumbers such as he had seen nowhere else, while the inhabitants traded with cowrie shells as currency.
Ibn Battuta ﵀ looked at the Islamic Gao, but the markets he walked through, the trading houses where he found lodging and the urban fabric that surrounded him stood on a foundation that had been laid centuries earlier, laid by the Sorko on the water, by the Gabibi on the fields, by the Gow in the wilderness and by the Za kings on the throne.
Gao was the proof that the Sahel brought forth cities, not from a lack of civilization but precisely from a deep understanding of the environment, of what the river gave, of what the desert demanded and of how two worlds together could become something greater than either on its own.
That is the legacy Islam encountered when it set foot ashore here. Not an emptiness. A worthy home.