Songhay Society
The core of the Songhay Empire was located in a region called the Niger Bend. This refers to a stretch of the Niger River in present-day Mali that runs northeast into the high Sahel for several hundred kilometers before turning south and eventually draining into the Atlantic Ocean.
It is the annual floodwaters of the Niger River that have made the Niger Bend so historically important for agricultural and pastoral economies. This geography has produced dichotomous social formations of sedentary riverine farmers and semi-nomadic pastoralists, living together in sometimes symbiotic relations, but very often also in conflict over access to the river and its resources. It seems likely that the dominant agricultural population in the Niger Bend under the Songhay Empire were speakers of one of the Songhay languages, although more localized oral historical and historical linguistic research would be required to confirm this in detail. The main pastoralist groups in the region were the Tuareg (language: Tamashek), Arabs (language: Hassaniyya Arabic), and Fulbe (language: Fulfulde).Slavery was widely practiced among both agricultural and pastoralist groups. It is difficult to know what percentage of the population was enslaved at the time of the Songhay Empire. Early colonial-era surveys in the area produced high percentages of enslaved people in the region in the late nineteenth century (well over 50 percent),[1692] but the accuracy of these numbers should not be taken especially seriously as projections backward in time.[1693] We can say however, that slaves were important parts of all the social formations in the Songhay Empire, and that they contributed a significant share of the agricultural and pastoralist labor. Enslavement was an important objective of the dry-season Songhay military campaigns, but it is probably more helpful to think of slaves as an integral part of the societies of the Niger Bend, with many more born into servitude within the territories of the state than captured from outside. Slaves acted as domestic workers and as herders for their masters, but they also lived in more-or-less autonomous villages which were expected to turn over fixed percentages of their production to their owners.
There was much interplay between these different types of slavery, and enslaved children born in slave villages could be taken to work in a domestic setting or herding animals. The multigenerational character of slavery in this context resembles caste structures elsewhere. We learn in some of the written sources about the Songhay Empire that rulers of the empire sometimes claimed to control entire villages of enslaved people. These claims were sometimes taken up again long after the end of the Songhay Empire, including at the beginning of the European colonial occupation of the region at the end of the nineteenth century.[1694]At the other end of the social hierarchy was the elite. In the (Western) Songhay language, there is a distinction between nobles (borochin) and non-nobles (har-bibi; gaa-bibi), which may or may not refer to slave status. At the village level, at least in the large majority of villages which were not designated for slaves, nobles controlled agricultural land and possessed livestock. (The land tenure system in Songhayspeaking villages was quite diverse at the end of the nineteenth century, ranging from quasi-feudal land ownership concentrated in only a few hands, to more equitable annual redistribution of communal land. It is not entirely clear from our sources what system(s) of land control existed in the period of the Songhay Empire, but it seems likely that it was a form of communal distribution among free villagers. The quasi-feudal forms of tenure seem to have been produced in the post-Songhay Arma period.)[1695]