The Neighbours of Songhay: Hausaland, Aïr and Bornu
Songhay was the largest empire of its age, but it was never the only one. East of the Niger bend lay a world of walled cities, desert sultanates and a dynasty that endured for seven centuries, and whoever wants to understand Songhay must first come to know the neighbours with whom it traded, fought and drew its borders.
An Empire Among Empires
It is tempting to tell the history of the Sahel as a relay race: first Ghana, then Mali, then Songhay, each empire taking the baton from the one before. That picture is tidy, but it is untrue. At Songhay’s height, in the sixteenth century, West Africa was not a succession of empires but a system of states that existed side by side, competed with one another and were interwoven through the same caravan routes, the same scholars and the same languages of trade.
East of Gao lay Hausaland, a network of walled city-states, and further to the northeast, in the middle of the Sahara, lay the Tuareg sultanate of Agadez in the Aïr mountains, while on the other side of the Sahel, by Lake Chad, ruled the dynasty of Kanem-Bornu, older than Songhay itself and tougher than any other empire in the region. These three neighbours form the context within which Songhay lived, and they show that the Askias did not reign over an empty continent but operated in a busy, literate, armed neighbourhood.
Hausaland: The Cities Behind the Walls
East of the Niger bend, between the Sahara and the rainforest, a network of walled cities grew from the fourteenth century onward whose names still exist today: Kano, Katsina, Zaria and Gobir, four of the seven Hausa bakwai, the “true” Hausa cities. Anyone travelling through the savanna saw them approaching from afar, not as palisades of wood but as walls of rammed earth, fifteen to twenty feet high, with towers and gates, and the wall of Kano, according to later measurements by the nineteenth-century traveller Heinrich Barth, was said to be about fourteen kilometres long.
Each city had its own character. Kano was the city of indigo, for the Indigofera plant thrived on the Kano plain, and around the city lay the famed dye pits, the marina, large clay-lined basins in which white cotton cloths were dipped ten or fifteen times until they took on a deep blue sheen. The blue robes of Kano were traded as far as Algiers and Cairo, and Leo Africanus mentioned the city’s cloths explicitly when he visited the region around 1510. Katsina became the city of books, a scholastic tradition that could rival that of Timbuktu and that in a later Fulani expression was called “the Timbuktu of Hausaland”. Zaria, the southernmost, was a trading hub but above all a slave market, where captives from the non-Islamic lands to the south were traded, while Gobir, in the north, was the watchpost on the edge of the Tuareg world and would later become the birthplace of Usman dan Fodio ﵀, whose jihad of 1804 would reshape the entire Hausa landscape.
The Islamisation of Hausaland followed a recognisable Sahel pattern. Around 1370, under Sarki Yaji of Kano, a group of forty Wangara arrived, Mandé traders and scholars from the Mali sphere, the same world that also nourished Songhay, and they came not to conquer but to trade and to teach. Yaji had the first Friday mosque built, appointed an imam and a Qadi, and the core of the court became Muslim while the countryside followed more slowly. A century later, Muhammad Rumfa (circa 1463 to 1499) made Kano an Islamic city-state in the full sense: he expanded the walls and the market, created new court titles, and brought ulama from across the Muslim world to advise him.
Here Hausaland touches Songhay directly, for one of those advisers was Muhammad al-Maghili ﵀, the jurist from Tlemcen who in those same years also counselled Askia Muhammad in Gao. Al-Maghili ﵀ wrote for Rumfa the treatise Tāj al-dīn fīmā yajib ʿalā al-mulūk, “The Crown of Religion in What Kings Owe”, while for the Askia he composed his famous Replies: the same scholar, the same juridical vision of Islamic kingship, two courts that lay hundreds of kilometres apart. The scholarship that shaped Songhay also shaped its neighbours, and that is precisely how interwoven this world was.
Agadez and the Aïr: Power from Position
In the middle of the Sahara, where the Aïr mountains rise like an island out of the sea of sand, lay Agadez, and the city teaches us a different kind of power than that of armies and gold mines. Agadez itself possessed almost nothing, but it lay on the spot that everyone needed, for caravans crossing the central Sahara had no way around the city: it was the only place within a radius of hundreds of kilometres where water was reliable and where markets and mosques stood. Whoever wanted to travel from Tripoli to Kano, or from Timbuktu to Bornu, had to stop here, for its value lay in its coordinates.
The city was a creation of the Tuareg, the Kel Tamasheq, Imazighen who had spread across the central Sahara. Their society was deeply stratified and, strikingly to outsiders, matrilineal: property and political position passed down through the mother’s line, and Ibn Battuta ﵀ devoted astonished pages in 1352 to Tuareg women who kept their faces uncovered while the men were veiled. Islam had arrived early but was always modified by Tamasheq customary law, a working combination of two systems of norms rather than the “superficial Islamisation” to which popular books too quickly reduce it. Around 1449 the principal Tuareg factions reached an accord and founded a joint sultanate, with a certain Yunus as the first recorded sultan, and our principal source for this, the Chronique d’Agadès, is for early Agadez what the Kano Chronicle is for Kano: the best point of entry, with all the caution that entails.
The most enduring monument is the Great Mosque with its minaret, about twenty-seven metres tall, built around 1515 of banco, unbaked mud reinforced with protruding palm-wood beams. Those beams are no decoration, for they absorb the enormous expansion and contraction that mud undergoes in the desert between day and night, and they serve as permanent scaffolding onto which craftsmen must climb again every rainy season to replaster the minaret. The Hausa masons of Agadez still practise today a specialisation that has continued unbroken for five hundred years.
And then, in 1515, Agadez touches the history of Songhay directly. Askia Muhammad, who had seized the throne in Gao in 1493 and had been expanding his empire for two decades, sent a military expedition to the Aïr, and according to the Tarikh al-Sudan and the Tarikh al-Fattash the campaign belonged to a series of operations by which the Askia sought to extend his grip on the northeastern caravan routes and secure his flank against Tuareg raids. The Songhay cavalry defeated an outnumbered Tuareg army, occupied the city, deposed the sultan and installed a loyal candidate bound to pay tribute. The subjection was brief, for within a generation Agadez was practically independent again, although Songhay authority nominally endured until 1591. The episode shows how fluid the borders of the pre-colonial Sahel were: “under Songhay” meant no administrative annexation as we know it, but tribute and recognition, while local Tuareg governance remained intact.
Kanem-Bornu: The Dynasty That Endured
On the other side of the Sahel, by Lake Chad, lay an empire older and more durable than Songhay itself. The Sayfawa dynasty ruled from about 1075 to 1846, more than seven hundred and seventy years, longer than the Capetians in France or the Habsburgs in Vienna, and it is without exaggeration the longest continuous Islamic dynasty in Africa. We are trained to think that African state formation was brief and fleeting, but the Sayfawa held out for seven centuries, first from Kanem east of the lake, and from the late fourteenth century, driven by drought and rival incursions, from Bornu to its west. The same family ruled with the same titles from a new heartland, for where a European dynasty vanished after a lost war, the Sayfawa simply shifted their weight and carried on. The new capital, Ngazargamu, numbered at its height an estimated two hundred to four hundred thousand inhabitants, in the same order of magnitude as Gao or Kano.
Above those seven centuries one reign stands out, that of Mai Idris Alooma, roughly 1564 to 1596, contemporary of the later Askias. Idris is known for something that often surprises: he sent envoys to Istanbul. At the court of sultan Murad III, ambassadors from Bornu appeared in the 1570s and 1580s, and letters from Bornu lie in the Topkapı archives to this day, for Murad III sent Turkish musketeers, instructors and gunpowder recipes via the pashas in Tripoli, and Idris acquired his own corps of musketeers. This means something remarkable for the chronology of Songhay: while the Moroccan Saadi rulers were still weighing how to cross the Sahara to threaten Songhay, Bornu had already had firearms in its ranks for years. The Battle of Tondibi of 1591, which with Moroccan gunpowder heralded the end of Songhay, was not the firearm’s first entry into the Sahel, for Bornu had been there earlier, only it aimed its weapons at its southern neighbours rather than at the west.
Our voice for all of this is Ahmad ibn Fartua ﵀, the chief imam of Ngazargamu and Idris’ personal counsellor, who from 1576 wrote the Kitāb ghazawāt Barnū, “The Book of the Campaigns of Bornu”, and without him Idris would be an empty silhouette to us. Unlike al-Maghili ﵀ in Kano, ibn Fartua ﵀ was no foreign guest scholar but a native Kanuri ulama, a chronicler in the line of al-Tabari and al-Waqidi, adapted to his own context but on the same intellectual level. Idris reformed the administration of justice along sharia procedure, built mosques in stone where the region was accustomed to mud, and made the hajj to Mecca, where, like Mansa Musa before him, he founded a hostel for pilgrims from his empire.
But Bornu, like Zaria and the other Sahel powers, was also a slave state. The campaigns against the Sao, the Kotoko and the Kwararafa brought back captives who were put to work within the empire or sold northward along the Fezzan route, and the trans-Saharan slave trade in this region was fed in the sixteenth century above all by Bornu. Other scholars, such as Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti ﵀ in his Miʿrāj al-Suʿūd, would criticise precisely these practices when they were applied to communities that had by then already become largely Islamic, for Idris built mosques and he raided villages, and both belong to the story.
What the Neighbours Teach Us About Songhay
Three neighbours, three very different states, and together they teach us three things about Songhay itself.
First: West Africa was polycentric. At the same moment that Askia Dawud governed his empire from Gao, Idris Alooma ruled from Ngazargamu an empire just as large with an entirely different foreign policy, Ottoman-oriented rather than Maghrebi, while Kano and Katsina flourished as literate city-states. The region was a system of states, not a single protagonist against an empty backdrop.
Second: the scholarship that made Songhay great knew no borders. The same Muhammad al-Maghili ﵀ advised both Askia Muhammad in Gao and Muhammad Rumfa in Kano, and students, manuscripts and legal ideas travelled freely along the caravan routes, so that Timbuktu, Katsina, Agadez and Ngazargamu stood, via Cairo and Mecca, in one chain with Istanbul and Damascus.
Third: the dark side was shared. Zaria, Bornu and Songhay all three lived in part from a slave economy that existed centuries before the Atlantic trade and continued centuries after it, and a mature reckoning with this history asks that we dare to see the flourishing and the cruelty together, for both belong to the same world.
Songhay fell in 1591 under Moroccan muskets, but its neighbours survived it in very different ways. Hausaland would become the cradle of the jihad of Usman dan Fodio ﵀ and the Sokoto caliphate, Agadez remained standing on its indispensable position in the Sahara, and Bornu held out for more than two centuries longer. The fall of one empire was, in this busy neighbourhood, never the end of the story.