Origins of the Songhay State

The name “Songhay Empire” is one bestowed upon this state by historians, and not the name that the state's rulers gave to it, as far as we know. Songhay was originally a name which denoted a set of patrilineal clans in the eastern reaches of the Niger Bend, although perhaps not originally including those who founded and ruled Gao, which would later become the capital city of the Songhay state.

Over time, the name Songhay came to denote leading clans in the area which formed the eastern heartland of the empire, including Gao. In the late fifteenth century, al-Maghili's replies to Askia Muhammad refers to the Songhay as a set of local rulers who had to be conquered and subjugated by the rulers of the empire at Gao.¹⁸ But the writer of the seventeenth-century chronicle, the Ta'rikh al-Sudan, used the term Songhay more expansively to refer to the core of free people who lived under Songhay rule, and who spoke one of several Songhay languages.¹⁹ Today, Songhay can be used in a narrower sense to refer to the patronymic Maiga, especially those Maiga who continue to engage in traditional practices frowned upon in Islam, and who are credited with being the descendants of the rulers of the empire. But it is also commonly used as an ethnolinguistic descriptor for all people who speak a Songhay language. As a linguistic descriptor, Songhay refers to a number of closely related but distinct languages spoken in the Niger Bend, extending as far west as Djenne and as far to the southeast as what is today western Niger and northern Benin. A northern branch of the Songhay languages was spoken as far away as Agadez (Niger), and is till spoken today at Tabelbala (Algeria).²⁰ The main Songhay languages are Koroboro Shenni (Eastern Songhay, spoken in Gao and in the Niger Bend east of Timbuktu), Koyra Chiini (Western Songhay, spoken in Timbuktu and in the western Niger Bend), and Zarma, spoken in Western Niger.

¹⁶ Nixon 2009, 251.

¹⁷ Moraes Farias 1993, 3-9. See Earle 1997 on ‘wealth finance'.

¹⁸ Hunwick 1985, 70.

¹⁹ Ibid., 70ff.

²⁰ Heath 1999, 1-3.

The core territory of what became the Songhay Empire in the eastern half of the Niger Bend, between Gao in the north and Kukiya in the south, has a long history of settlement and urbanization. It is mentioned under the name Kawkaw (which would have been pronounced as “Gaw-Gaw”) as early as the ninth century in Arabic geographic writings, where it is referred to as an important kingdom in the “land of the blacks.” According to al-Ya‘qubi (d. 897), an Arab geographer who traveled in North Africa, Kawkaw

is the greatest of the realms of the Sudan, the most important and powerful. All the kingdoms obey its king. Al-Kawkaw is the name of the town. Besides this there are a number of kingdoms of which the rulers pay allegiance to him and acknowledge his sovereignty, although they are kings in their own lands.^[1674]

By the time that al-Ya‘qubi wrote this, archaeological evidence confirms that Gao was already an important trans-Saharan trade entrepot, connecting the eastern Niger Bend to trade routes that led through northern Saharan towns like Ouargla and Ghadames and then onto what is today eastern Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.^[1675] Perhaps most spectacularly, this region is home to the earliest extant body of datable texts written in West Africa, in the Arabic inscriptions on the aforementioned stelae and tombstones, the earliest of which date from the eleventh century. Many of the tombstones mark royal graves, and some of them provide evidence for a high level of wealth, given that they were inscribed on marble imported from Spain.^[1676] Islam was adopted by the people of Gao, we are told, by the tenth century.^[1677]

So, from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, Gao was the center of a regionally important polity of some kind, well connected to networks of trans-regional trade. Our information about the period that followed does not allow us to say very much with confidence.

What we know is that at some point in the early fourteenth century, Gao came under the domination of the expanding state of Ancient Mali, which was now able to exercise some form of control over this entrepot of trade with the central Sahara. It is not clear how this occurred, although one tradition recorded in the Ta’rikh al-Sudan suggests that Gao was incorporated into Ancient Mali upon the visit to the city by the Malian king Mansa Musa (whom the Songhay call Kankan Musa) on return from his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina via Egypt (he reached Cairo in July 1324, went to Mecca in either 1324 or 1325, and returned to West Africa, probably, in 13 26).^[1678] According to this story, Gao was not defeated militarily by Ancient Mali, but acquiesced voluntarily, perhaps in recognition of the greatly enhanced authority that Mansa Musa enjoyed as a result of his pilgrimage. Mansa Musa is supposed to have built a congregational mosque in Gao, perhaps as a way of stamping his new authority on the town.^[1679] However, there is other evidence that things may not have been so peaceful. According to epigraphic evidence, at least part of the ruling elite at Gao seems to have retreated southward to the town of Kukiya, where they ruled a much more limited domain throughout the period of Malian control. We do not know when Ancient Mali lost control of Gao, but it was probably in the early fifteenth century, likely before 1438, when Ancient Malian authorities had withdrawn from Timbuktu.^[1680]

So far we have concentrated on eastern Niger Bend and the town of Gao, which was the heartland of the proto Songhay states. But equally important to the empire was the western Niger Bend, which was more populous and economically productive. It was in this region that another important commercial entrepot in the trans-Saharan and West African trade emerged at Timbuktu. According to local traditions, Timbuktu was founded in the eleventh century as a small nomadic camp.

But its location 20 kilometers north of the Niger River in a particularly salubrious position for Saharan merchants, yet close to densely populated agricultural areas along the Niger River and its various seasonal lakes that the river feeds to the south and west, helped to make Timbuktu an important commercial town. Timbuktu displaced Walata as the main entrepot for Ancient Mali by the time that the town came under the control of Ancient Mali by the fourteenth century. Closely tied to the Songhay-speaking town of Djenne upriver, Dyula merchants began bringing gold from the Akan forests in present-day Ghana up to the Niger River at Djenne, and from there to Timbuktu, where it passed to Saharan merchants. As in Gao, the Malian king Mansa Musa passed through on his return from his pilgrimage, bringing with him an Andalusian scholar, Abu Ishaq Ibrahim al-Sahili, who designed the congregational mosque in Timbuktu called Jingaray Ber (or Djinguereber in current Malian orthography), which still stands and serves the same function today. He also designed the Malian ruler's residence in Timbuktu, called the Madugu, which does not survive.^[1681] Timbuktu's growing prominence as a commercial town attracted Muslim scholars who began settling there. Unlike Gao, which never became a very important intellectual center for Muslim scholarship, Timbuktu grew to be the single most important site of Islamic knowledge production in West Africa during the period of the Songhay Empire.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

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