Tondibi and the Death Blow: The End of the First West African Era

On an afternoon in March 1591 a Songhay army of forty thousand men stood facing four thousand Moroccans with firearms. Within a few hours West Africa had changed for two hundred years.

A Date to Establish

Let us first set the facts straight, for in our own production system this event is recorded under the year 1592, and that is an approximation that on a lecture cannot remain unchallenged. The Battle of Tondibi, the decisive confrontation that sealed the fate of Songhay, took place on approximately 13 March 1591. The Moroccan expedition departed from Marrakesh in October 1590, crossed the Sahara in the winter of 1590-1591, and conducted Tondibi in March 1591. The year 1592 that stands in our production description refers to the full occupation of Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné, which was consolidated over the course of 1591 and 1592.

For tonight I treat the blow as what it was: an event in 1591, with an aftermath that extends to 1592 and beyond.

Ahmad al-Mansur: The Golden Sultan

To understand Tondibi we must first know the man who gave the order. Ahmad al-Mansur ruled as Saadi sultan of Morocco from 1578 to 1603. He came to power at a golden moment: his nephew Abd al-Malik had just achieved a great victory at the Battle of the Three Kings (1578), in which the Portuguese king Sebastian fell along with two other kings, including Abd al-Malik himself, who died during or directly after the battle. Ahmad ascended the throne out of this confusion, received the nickname al-Mansur (the Victorious) and later also al-Dhahabi (the Golden), because of his immeasurable wealth.

But that wealth was not unlimited. Al-Mansur inherited a state that had just fought a heavy war, a luxurious court that cost money every day, an army of Turkish janissaries and Andalusian Moriscos that had to be paid, and ambitions that exceeded all his income. He wanted to found a modern Islamic empire that would compete with the Ottomans. He had the El-Badi palace in Marrakesh built, an imperial residence whose imported marble from Italy alone cost astronomical sums. He maintained a fleet, a standing army, an international diplomatic presence that even reached as far as England (his ambassadors met Queen Elizabeth I).

For all this he needed gold. And he knew exactly where that gold came from.

The Logic of the Invasion

Al-Mansur’s advisers warned him against the expedition to Songhay. Crossing the Sahara with an army had never been attempted at scale. The distance was triple that of any Arab campaign in early Islamic history. Water was unpredictable. Diseases were certain. Even if the army arrived on the other side, it would have to operate in a hostile zone of enormous size, without supply lines.

Al-Mansur listened and went ahead anyway. His calculation was cold: even if half of his army died in the desert, the other half with firearms could defeat a Songhay army, and one successful occupation would be enough to redirect the gold route from the southern caravan stations to Marrakesh itself. The investment was small. The possible return was permanent control over West African gold production.

And there was more. Al-Mansur saw himself as Islamic reformer of the Sahel. He knew of the slow disintegration of Songhay. He saw the internal succession wars, the complaints of Moroccan merchants about arbitrary taxation in the caravan stations, the religious accusations against the Askias as unsuitable Muslim rulers. In his eyes this was a jihad: a legitimate subjugation of a slackened empire under the authority of a true Islamic sovereign.

This was rhetoric, but not only rhetoric. Al-Mansur had legal arguments worked out by his court ulema to frame the expedition as a religious duty. That is important to note, because the later Ahmed Baba ﵀ would precisely contest this jihad justification in his writings, from his Moroccan exile, in an act of intellectual courage that has made him immortal.

Judar Pasha and His Men

The command of the expedition al-Mansur gave to Judar Pasha, a man whose biography is itself a microcosm of the Mediterranean-Islamic world of that time. Judar was born as Diego de Guevara, a Spaniard from Las Cuevas in Almería, captured as a young boy during a sea raid, converted to Islam in Morocco, castrated to serve as eunuch servant at court, and risen up to the rank of pasha. At his departure to the Sahara he was not yet thirty-five years old.

His troops were a multicolored assembly: Turkish janissaries with muskets, Andalusian Morisco arquebusiers who had been expelled from Spain after 1492 (many of them still spoke Spanish among themselves), Moroccan cavalry with sabers and lances, a small English renegade unit as artillerymen. In total about four thousand combat troops, plus thousands of servants, camel drivers, guides, smiths. Together probably nearly eight thousand souls who crossed the Atlas mountains.

They carried, according to the sources: six pieces of artillery (light cannons), about two thousand arquebuses and muskets, powder and ammunition for several battles, four months of food and water supplies.

The journey began in October 1590 from Marrakesh. The route went via Tafilalt, then southward through the western Sahara, via Taghaza and Taodenni (salt mines), then via Araouane southward to Timbuktu. The total distance: about 2500 kilometers. The time: five months. The losses: according to most sources the expedition lost between a third and half of its troops on the way to thirst, exhaustion, Tuareg raids. When they arrived at the Niger at the end of February 1591, there were still about four thousand effective fighters left.

Those four thousand would prove enough.

Askia Ishaq II: A King in the Trap

Askia Ishaq II had not yet been one year on the throne in 1591. He had won the throne in the civil war of 1588 after the death of Askia Muhammad Bani, but his position was contested. Several of his nephews continued to claim. The farmas of the coastal provinces did not pay all tributes. The Tuareg in the north were restless.

When in February 1591 scouts reported to Ishaq II that a Moroccan army was approaching the Niger, he underestimated the threat. How could four thousand men, exhausted from a desert journey, threaten an empire of five and a half million inhabitants? He mobilized his army, according to the common sources about forty thousand men, mainly cavalry with lances and bows and a mass of footmen with swords and spears. He marched to the northwest to intercept Judar’s army.

The confrontation took place at Tondibi, about thirty-five kilometers north of Gao, on an open plain along the Niger. It was probably 13 March 1591.

The Battle

You must imagine: on one side a Songhay army in parade formation. The dendi-fari commands the right; the balama the left; Askia Ishaq II himself in the middle, on a white camel with a gilded saddle. Before the cavalry a row of cattle herds is placed, more than a thousand head. The plan is: drive the cattle into the lines of the Moroccans, so that their formation falls apart, and follow with the cavalry charge.

On the other side Judar Pasha’s troops in a compact square formation. Three rows of arquebusiers deep, with cannons on the corners. The Moriscos in front, the Turks behind them. Judar himself in the center with the reserve.

The battle began with the cattle charge. But cattle are not trained for noise. When the arquebuses fired their first volley, with hundreds of shots at once and clouds of black powder smoke and the dull pounding of the cannon, the cattle turned around. They did not storm into the Moroccan lines. They stormed back into the Songhay lines, in panic, and broke up the own cavalry formation.

Before Ishaq II could regroup, Judar’s cannons rolled forward and a second arquebus volley was fired. The Songhay cavalry, which had never prepared for firearms in this density, fell apart. Individual riders fled. Others tried to charge through the square formation, but fell by the dozens under the concentrated salvos. The Tarikh al-Sudan reports that within hours the battlefield lay strewn with dead, mainly on the Songhay side. The Moroccans lost according to their own report fewer than a hundred men.

Askia Ishaq II fled with his remaining troops southward, toward Dendi, where in the marshes he could find refuge. He was not captured, but his army had been knocked out as a central fighting force. The road to Gao lay open.

The Taking of the Cities

Judar Pasha marched to Gao and took the capital without significant resistance. He was shocked by what he found: a city, certainly, with palaces and mosques, but less rich than Marrakesh, less imposing than he had expected. The gold reserves of the Askia were smaller than his reports had suggested. He wrote a disappointed letter to al-Mansur: “The house of a donkey driver in Marrakesh is better than the palace of the Askia.”

Al-Mansur was not amused. He soon replaced Judar with Mahmud ibn Zarqun, a harder man, and instructed him to push through the occupation. Djenné was taken. Timbuktu was taken. The Moroccan garrisons established themselves in the three capitals of the old Songhay.

The occupation authority would in the following decades be known as the Pashalik of Timbuktu, a Moroccan-Andalusian military colony that nominally obeyed Marrakesh but within thirty years became essentially independent. The descendants of the Morisco soldiers remained in the cities and gradually formed a new population group, the Arma (after the Arabic al-rumi or Spanish arma for weapon), which would remain a recognizable population group in Timbuktu into the nineteenth century.

The Deportation of the Scholars

Here we must pause. This is the event that more than any other has burned the memory of 1591 into Islamic history.

In October 1593 Mahmud ibn Zarqun on al-Mansur’s orders gave instruction to put the scholars of Timbuktu in chains and deport them to Morocco. The reason: unrest in the city, possibly a coalition of scholars who preached against the occupation. About seventy prominent scholars, including Ahmed Baba ﵀ himself and his family, were arrested and put on caravan to the north.

The journey was brutal. According to Ahmed Baba’s own later testimony many died on the way. The group arrived in Marrakesh in May 1594, after a journey that had lasted months and in which the scholars were forced to walk on foot, in chains, through the Sahara. Ahmed Baba ﵀ would later write that his books, his library of 1600 volumes that he had carefully built up, had been plundered, and that among his brothers safe in Morocco he was nevertheless the poorest of the poor, “for I arrived without my books”.

Think on this for a moment. For a scholar his books are his world. The carrying off of Ahmed Baba’s library was as traumatic for him as any physical mistreatment. In his letters from Morocco a sorrow resounds that no other setback equals.

In Marrakesh Ahmed Baba ﵀ was initially held captive. But al-Mansur, who himself was attached to religious legitimacy, could ultimately not afford to keep the greatest West African scholar in irons. Ahmed Baba ﵀ was released, was placed under house arrest in Marrakesh, and there began a whole new phase of his productivity. He gave lectures, received pupils from the entire Maghreb, debated with the Moroccan Ulema, and wrote some of his most important works.

Mi’raj al-Su’ud: The Refusing Pen

One of those works deserves our special attention. It is called Mi’raj al-Su’ud (The Ladder of Ascent), and it is a juridical treatise on slavery. It was written around 1615, in Marrakesh.

The context: the Moroccan slave market in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had absorbed tens of thousands of slaves from West Africa, many of them sold under the pretense that they were “infidels” who had been captured during a jihad. This was juridically dubious. Many of these slaves were Muslims, born in Muslim communities, sold by merchants who did not concern themselves with their religious status.

Ahmed Baba ﵀, from his own experience of forced deportation from his Islamic city by an Islamic sovereign, wrote a sharp juridical advisory. He established that conversion to Islam abolishes slavery, not automatically, but juridically. He established that the merchants who sold Muslims as slaves were acting in conflict with the Maliki school of law. He established that many West African communities, especially the Soninke, Songhay, Fulbe and Hausa, had been Muslim for generations, and their members thus could not legally be made into slaves.

Mi’raj al-Su’ud was read and cited in North Africa and the Middle East into the eighteenth century. It is one of the earliest systematic juridical objections to what a Black scholar saw as the injustice in the Islamic slave trade of his own time. This is relevant for us, here in this audience, because it is evidence of the intellectual tradition in which our ancestors stood. Ahmed Baba ﵀ wrote against the trade that would carry off a portion of those same ancestors.

He died in 1627, back in Timbuktu, where he had been allowed to spend his last years after al-Mansur’s death.

What 1591 Has Broken

Tondibi and its aftermath have essentially changed West Africa, until the coming of the nineteenth-century jihad movements (Usman dan Fodio ﵀ and Sokoto, the reform of Hamdullahi under Seku Ahmadu, the Mande jihad of al-Hajj Umar Tal), from a continent of imperial Islamic state formation into a continent of local, fragmentary Islamic states.

The great trans-Saharan trading axis never broke entirely. The salt routes continued to exist. The Islamic scholarly tradition in Timbuktu, Djenné and elsewhere lived on, though never again at the same level as under the Askias. But the great model — a central administration, a standing army, a standardized jurisprudence, a systematic taxation, a diplomatic position in the international Islamic order — that model only came to life again two centuries later, in Usman dan Fodio’s Sokoto Caliphate from 1804.

Between 1591 and 1804: a time of Pashalik fragmentation, rising local Muslim states such as Segou and Kaarta, intensifying Atlantic slave trade, and a slow shift of the economic center of gravity from the Sahel to the coast.

This is the end of part one of our lecture. What we have discussed tonight up to now — from the Niger river that fed a civilization, via Ghana and Mali and the Hajj of Mansa Musa, via Sunni Ali and Askia Muhammad to the fall at Tondibi — is the story of the first West African Islamic era. An era in which our ancestors built empires, founded libraries, drew up legislation, sent diplomats to Cairo and Marrakesh.

The Door to Part Two

What comes after 1591 is the story that personally concerns many in this audience. The centuries in which West Africa became politically fragmented, while at the same time the European demand for African labor grew exponentially. The centuries in which our ancestors — Akan, Wolof, Fulbe, Mande, Igbo, Yoruba — were forced to make the Atlantic passage, to Suriname, Curaçao, Aruba, Trinidad, Jamaica, Brazil. The centuries in which the Islamic identity that they sometimes carried with them came under extreme pressure, often disappeared, sometimes survived in hidden forms.

And then, in the nineteenth century, the great jihad movements. Usman dan Fodio ﵀ who founded the Sokoto. Al-Hajj Umar Tal ﵀ who built his own state. Samory Touré who resisted French colonization to the last. The Mahdi in Sudan. Islam, far from extinct in West Africa, blossomed again, now in reaction to both internal and external pressure.

That is part two. That is the other half of our evening.

But for now, with Tondibi behind us and the deportation of Ahmed Baba ﵀ as emotional pivot, I close this first part. The first great West African Islamic era, from the fifth-century Sorko on the Niger to the sixteenth-century Askia on his throne, is at an end. What follows is another world, a broken world, a world in which our ancestors nevertheless carried what they could carry.

This was no primitive past. This was a civilization.

And this, dear attendees, is not the end of the story. It is only the half.

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