The Decline of Songhay: Patricide on the Niger
What Askia had built up in thirty-five years, his sons began to demolish in one generation. And on the coast appeared sails that no one yet understood.
A Deposed Old Man
In August 1528 three of Askia Muhammad’s sons gathered in secret at the edge of Gao. Askia Musa, the eldest, was the driving force. Askia Benkan and Askia Ismail stood beside him. The father was by now nearly ninety years old, blind, largely withdrawn into his palace quarters. The question between the brothers was not whether the old man would be deposed. That decision had already been made. The question was: which of them would receive the throne after him?
Musa won that political conversation, because he brought the army with him. When Askia Muhammad was deposed that month by his own son, he did not resist, or could not resist; the sources are vague. The Tarikh al-Sudan tells the moment with a kind of poetic sadness: the old king asked for a place to pray, was given one, and was thereafter banished to an island in the Niger, Kangaba, where he would spend the rest of his days.
For nine years, from 1528 to his death in 1538, Askia Muhammad lived on that island. Friends and family could visit him. The Tarikh al-Fattash contains anecdotes from which it is clear that he remained of clear mind, received people, retained some influence. But politically he was dead. His sons ruled.
Askia Musa: A Crown of Three Years
The patricide was less a glorious takeover than a dangerous gamble. Musa had hardly seated himself on the throne before his brothers began to quarrel among themselves over the division of provinces, taxes, military commands. Ismail was unhappy. Benkan felt passed over. And the provincial governors, the farmas whom Askia Muhammad had appointed, took sides depending on their own interests.
Askia Musa reigned three years. In 1531 he was murdered, not by an external enemy, but by a nephew (some sources say his own brother) in a palace plot. The Tarikh al-Sudan names the murderer as Askia Muhammad Benkan, who then claimed the throne for himself. With this began a pattern that for the next six decades would mark the palace of Gao: no succession without blood.
You must understand what this means for an empire. The central state of Songhay had become, under the old Askia, an institution, not only the person of the king. But an institution survives only if the rules of the game are predictable. As soon as the throne becomes an object of theft, and every succession moment a risky power moment, legitimacy crumbles from the top. The qadis in the cities continue to dispense justice, the farmas continue to collect taxes, the caravans keep moving. But the regime in Gao loses who it actually is.
Benkan reigned from 1531 to 1537. He was deposed by yet another brother, Askia Ismail, who himself died in 1539. Then followed Askia Ishaq I (1539-1549), Askia Dawud (1549-1582, a relatively stable period), and then in quick succession Askia Muhammad IV, Askia Muhammad Bani, and finally Askia Ishaq II who in 1591 would experience the death blow of Tondibi. Eleven Askias in sixty-three years. By comparison: Askia Muhammad the Great alone reigned thirty-five years.
Askia Muhammad Benkan and the First Years
Often Askia Muhammad Benkan (reigned 1531-1537) is summarized in tellings as “yet another ambitious brother”. But his reign is interesting because it shows how the Songhay institutions, built by his father Muhammad, despite the succession crises continued to function. Benkan maintained the Hajj delegations. He received ambassadors from Morocco. He confirmed the qadis in their posts. He paid the stipends to the scholars of Timbuktu. The state administration kept turning, like a machine that has built up its own momentum.
This is an important point for our understanding of institutional sustainability. A state is not just a king. A state is a set of agreements, procedures, expectations, career paths for officials, reputation mechanisms for courts. Askia Muhammad had woven those into a fabric stronger than one person. Even while the brothers murdered each other, taxes kept coming in, caravans kept moving, qadis kept dispensing justice.
But a fabric frays. Each coup interrupted a career or forced an official to take sides. Each new Askia had to replace part of the higher hierarchy with his own loyalists. The institutional continuity was slowly, scrape by scrape, undermined.
Askia Dawud: A Temporary Recovery
Let us be honest. Not all the successors were catastrophes. Askia Dawud, who reigned from 1549 to 1582, gave Songhay thirty-three years of relative stability. He reformed agriculture. He again promoted the scholarly institutes. He maintained correspondence with the Maghreb. He cultivated diplomatic relations with the Saadi dynasty in Morocco, which at that moment was just rising. Under Dawud, Timbuktu blossomed again, although now more as an intellectual center than as a growth machine.
But under Dawud something also began to shift fundamentally, and this is where we must pause.
The Atlantic Competitor
In 1482 Portugal had, long before Sunni Ali died, built a trading post on the West African coast: Elmina, on what we today call the Ghanaian Gold Coast. From there the Portuguese began to trade directly with the Akan gold fields. Not via the trans-Saharan routes. Not via Timbuktu. Not via Songhay.
This was revolutionary, and its consequences were slow but irreversible. The Saharan trade had connected West Africa for more than seven centuries with the Mediterranean. Every ounce of gold that traveled from Bambuk or Bure or the Akan to Fez or Cairo went via caravan routes that were controllable by Songhay. Tax, toll, trading posts: that was the foundation of Songhay income. Salt from Taghaza traveled the same route. This was the system that al-Bakri ﵀ and Ibn Battuta ﵀ had described.
But a Portuguese ship in Elmina can negotiate directly with an Akan merchant. The caravan that once inevitably went via Djenné or Gao began to receive optional alternatives. In 1510, in 1530, in 1550 this was still only a small portion of the total. By 1580 it was a substantial factor. And the Portuguese and subsequently Dutch and English expansion on the coast gradually pushed the profit margins of the Sahara trade lower.
For Songhay this meant: the economic foundation that Askia Muhammad had inherited began under his successors to wash away gradually. Not suddenly. But irreversibly.
And this is something that no Islamic source from that time has been able to analyze well, because the Songhay elite did not see the Portuguese coast as a competitor. They saw only their own markets. This was the blind spot that the empire would carry along into its fall.
The Sahel Dries Up
Alongside that economic pressure came another pressure that we too often forget: the climate. A series of dendrochronological and paleoclimatological studies have shown that the sixteenth century was a period of increased drought in the Sahel. Between 1450 and 1600 the southern boundary of the Sahara slowly shifted southward. Villages that had been livable under Askia Muhammad became more difficult under Askia Dawud. Caravan routes that under Mansa Musa had had familiar water stations dried up over decades.
This is no complete explanation, but it is a factor. An empire that experiences several successive drought years loses grain reserves, loses population in border regions, loses the economic base for its tax system. Songhay suffered from this together with its own political instability. Two forces in the same direction, and each force accelerates the other.
The Salt and Gold Monopolies Crumble
A specific symptom. The salt mine of Taghaza, high in the Sahara, had since the time of Mansa Musa essentially supplied the monopoly on Sahel salt. The Songhay state controlled the Taghaza route and collected duties on the salt. But in the second half of the sixteenth century Taghaza itself came into danger: the wells became saltier, the Moroccan Saadis began to interfere with who exactly ruled over Taghaza, and Askia Dawud had to send military expeditions to maintain the position.
In 1586 Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur of Morocco launched a small expedition to occupy Taghaza directly. He was repulsed, but it became clear to the Songhay rulers that Moroccan interest in the Sahara was not diplomatic. Al-Mansur, whom we shall meet at length in the next article, had greater ambitions than just a salt mine.
Brothers Against Brothers
While this external pressure increased, the internal pattern of brother-against-brother continued. After Dawud’s death in 1582 his son Askia Muhammad al-Hajj followed, who already in 1586 was deposed by his brother Askia Muhammad Bani. Bani died unexpectedly in 1588, and a full civil war broke out between factions supporting different Askia candidates. This was a moment of real fragmentation: provincial governors in the coastal regions stopped paying tribute, Tuareg tribes again began to raid the northern settlements, Mossi troops came up from the south.
Out of the chaos eventually Askia Ishaq II emerged as winner, but his position was far from firm. His own brothers and nephews continued to intrigue. His farmas were dissatisfied. His army had endured internal succession struggles, which had even divided soldiers into factions.
And in precisely that moment of maximum internal weakness, Ahmad al-Mansur sent an army from Marrakesh across the Sahara.
But that is for the next telling. For now, for this chapter on the decline, it is enough to note: between 1528 and 1591 Songhay underwent no catastrophic collapse. It was hollowed out slowly. By succession wars. By economic pressure from the coast. By climate fluctuations. By a bureaucracy that lost balance when the top wavered.
It was an institution that lost its own administrative power, from the inside out.
The Scholars Live On
There is one aspect that personally strikes me in every investigation of this period. However politically Songhay fell apart, the scholarly tradition in Timbuktu continued to flourish. Ahmed Baba al-Timbukti ﵀ was born in 1556, in the middle of these turbulent decades, from the Aqit family that had been restored to honor under Askia Muhammad. He studied under his father and under Muhammad Baghayogho ﵀, himself one of the great scholars of the Sankore university. By 1580 Ahmed Baba ﵀ was himself teacher, author, prominent mufti. By 1590 he had already written several books.
The institutional infrastructure of Islamic knowledge in Timbuktu lived on, even while the political center wavered. This is a reminder of something we see more often in Islamic civilizations: the Ulema tradition is not bound to one specific ruler, but to a community of readers and transmitters. As long as there are manuscripts and as long as there are study circles, the tradition lives.
But this independence too had its limit. When in 1591 Moroccan troops took Timbuktu, the Ulema community would experience something it had never experienced: a total physical disruption. The libraries were plundered, scholars were led in chains to Marrakesh, an entire generation of academic production was interrupted.
Our Afro-Caribbean diaspora may read this with a shudder of recognition. The physical removal of scholars is the same structural act as the later physical removal of our own ancestors in the transatlantic slave trade: a system of forced deportation whose goal is not extermination, but expropriation, repurposing, forced labor or forced service to a foreign elite. The context is different, the order of magnitude incomparable, and yet: the logic resides in the same family.
Court Intrigues and the Queen Mother
There is one aspect of the Songhay decline that in the common tellings is rarely discussed, but which is emphatically present in the sources themselves: the role of women at court, and especially the position of the queen mother.
In Songhay tradition the magha-koi, the mother of the reigning Askia, had a formal function at court with her own income, her own staff and her own political influence. During succession crises it was often the mothers of rival princes who behind the scenes forged alliances, traded marriage gifts, bribed army officers. The Tarikh al-Fattash contains various anecdotes about court women who were decisive in determining which prince received the support of which faction.
This is not “harem intrigue” in the orientalist sense we know from bad tellings. This is regular court politics, as existed in all world empires of the premodern period, from the Ottomans to the Chinese imperial courts to Versailles. The absence of women from our usual Songhay narrative says more about our own narrative conventions than about historical reality.
For an Afro-Caribbean audience this is relevant because the matriarchally weighted structure of many Afro-Caribbean communities is sometimes seen as a post-slavery phenomenon, a consequence of family disruption under plantation conditions. But in West Africa itself women already before the slave trade had positions of power in courts, in trade, in religious life. The line is no break but a continuity under disturbed circumstances.
The Role of Ahmed Baba’s Youth
While the court in Gao through its brother-against-brother wars deteriorated, in Timbuktu a child was being raised who would ultimately become the most weighty scholar of his generation. Ahmed Baba al-Timbukti ﵀ was born in 1556. His father Ahmad ibn Ahmad was already a known scholar. The family stood directly in the line of the Aqit, who had been driven out under Sunni Ali, restored under Askia Muhammad, and now, under the weaker Askias, had to maintain a delicate balance with an increasingly unpredictable court.
Ahmed Baba ﵀ studied under his father, under Muhammad Baghayogho ﵀ (a Fulbe scholar), under various other masters. By his thirtieth he was teacher. By his fortieth he was authorized to issue fatwas. His bookstore in Timbuktu grew, according to his own testimony, to 1600 volumes, which for that time was an enormous private library.
What is relevant for our story of the decline: Ahmed Baba ﵀ grew up in a city that told him his work mattered. The Islamic infrastructure of Timbuktu was strong enough to form young scholars, even while the political empire in which the city lay was falling apart. This means that Islamic civilization in the region at the level of the city had its own resilience that stood apart from the imperial crown.
But that would change in 1591. Then the physical infrastructure itself would be struck. And then it appears that knowledge without a state to protect it is ultimately also vulnerable.
An Empire on the Edge
In the year 1590 Askia Ishaq II sat on the throne in Gao. He ruled an empire that on paper was still the largest of West Africa, on paper could still mobilize forty or fifty thousand soldiers, on paper still controlled the Taghaza salt route.
But in reality it was a hollow tree. The roots were rotted by succession wars. The branches had withered from economic pressure from the south. And from the north, from Marrakesh, came the axe.
An axe of about four thousand men. Equipped with a weapon that West Africa had not yet seen in great numbers: the arquebus, the firearm. Under the command of a eunuch general of Andalusian origin named Judar Pasha.
That axe was at that moment undergoing the heaviest march that an army had ever undertaken through the Sahara. Thousands of kilometers of desert. Hunger, thirst, losses. According to some sources no more than a third of the original troops arrived alive at the Niger Bend. But the third that arrived still carried its arquebuses. And that was enough.
Father’s Death, Brother’s Murder, Betrayal
What began in 1528 with Askia Musa deposing his father brought us in 1590 to Askia Ishaq II who from a divided court had to face a Moroccan invasion. Between those two dates lies the complete story of an empire that ate its own future.
It is, you must say it, a Greek drama, but Sahelian. Each generation wanted to be better than the previous. Each generation demolished what the previous had built. And in the end there was no one left to defend the gates of Gao against an enemy who had come through the desert in an unimaginable way.
That is no story of primitiveness. That is a story of maturity. Great empires always fall from within first. The external blow is only the last drop.