Original subtitles

In the year 1858, the German explorer Heinrich Barth

travelled across the wide expanse of the Sahara Desert.

He was determined to reach the city of Timbuktu

that lay at its far edge. He spoke Arabic along with several

African languages, and made careful notes about the places he passed

through. His journey all around West Africa would

ultimately be a trip of nearly 20,000 kilometers.

But Barth was always on the lookout for more sights to see,

and on the arduous return leg of his journey, he heard rumors

of something that only a handful of Europeans had ever seen before.

His guides told him of the existence of an enormous,

ruined city lost in the African bush, a city that had once commanded the

continent's greatest empire. His guides

called this city Gao.

As soon as I had made out that Gao was the place which for

several centuries had been the capital of a strong and mighty

empire in this region, I felt a more ardent desire to visit it then

I had to reach Timbuktu. Gao had been the center of a great national movement from

whence powerful and successful princes spread their conquests.

Barth gathered his things and set out, following the Niger River along with his

guides through the swampy lowlands and flat

desert plains, swatting away mosquitoes and tsetse flies

until he reached the site of the former city.

But what he saw disappointed him; he found only a small collection of huts,

about 300 in total, with heaps of overgrown rubble

where the ancient city had once stood. This once busy locality, which according

to the unanimous statements of former writers,

was the most splendid city of Africa, is now the desolate abode of a small and

miserable population. Just opposite my tent

lay the ruined massive tower, the last remains of the principal mosque of the

capital. All around the wide, open area in which

we were encamped was woven a rich corona of vegetation,

among which in the clear light of the morning, I

discovered date palms, tamarind trees, sycamores, and silk

cottons. Not to be deterred, Barth explored the

ruins of the ancient city and took detailed

notes about what he saw. The town,

in its most flourishing period, seems to have had a circumference of about six

miles. The east quarter of the mosque is

entirely girded with a thick grove of siwak bushes which covers all the

uninhabited part of the former city. The mosque consisted originally of a low

building flanked on the east and west side by a large tower,

the whole courtyard being surrounded by a wall about eight feet in height.

The eastern tower is in ruins but the western one

is still tolerably well-preserved. It rises in seven terraces which gradually

decrease in diameter. The inhabitants still offer their

prayers in this sacred space where their great conqueror is interred,

although they have not sufficient energy to repair the whole.

His guides told him that this had been the capital of an empire known

as the Songhai. Barth soon left the ruins of Gao to the silk

cottons and sycamore trees, and continued on his journey home. But

the site of the ruined city seems to have stuck with him and

wherever he went, he would ask the same questions;

how had the Empire of Songhai grown to such

size in the harsh desert landscape of the southern Sahara?

How had its people held such a society together

and built such grand constructions? Why, after rising to such great

heights, had they left it all here to crumble

into the dust and shifting dunes of the desert?

My name's Paul Cooper and you're listening to The Fall of Civilizations

Podcast. Every episode, I look at a civilization

of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of

history. I want to ask what did they have in

common? What led to their fall? What did it feel like to be a person

alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world?

In this episode, I want to look at a society that has been all but forgotten

by popular narratives of history; the Songhai people

of West Africa. I want to explore how this great civilization rose up

among some of the harshest conditions our planet can throw at us, how they

united two warring traditions, became a

cosmopolitan and pluralistic society as well as Africa's greatest empire,

and I want to explain why, after barely more than a century of greatness,

their whole society collapsed around them.

This will be an episode about cycles, and our first cycle is that of the

planet Earth itself.

As the Earth spins through the dark void of space,

it turns on its axis, giving us the cycle of night and day.

But there's another planetary cycle that affects us all

just as profoundly, although it is much, much slower. This

is the wobble of the Earth, known more scientifically

as its axial procession. This wobble is caused by the gentle

gravitational tug of the other planets in our solar system

and it changes the angle of the planet's tilt

by about one degree every 72 years until it tilts a full 23 degrees each

way. This cycle lasts for over 25,000

years and this tilt can have some extreme effects on the climate on the

planet's surface. Over the last 8,000 years or so, one of

these effects has been to shift the pattern of monsoon

rains on the African continent, pushing them southward, and creating an

enormous dry zone in its northern region. This has created one of Earth's most

impressive geographic features; the Sahara Desert.

The Sahara is a vast ocean of sand dunes, rock plateaus, and salt flats that covers

an area totaling nine million square kilometers.

This desert makes up around 30% of the entire

African continent, but until about 5,000 years ago,

these bare sand dunes were rolling, green grasslands.

The landscape was broken by rivers and huge lakes

that supported late stone-age human communities.

Sparse forests grew here, full of oak and walnut,

lime, and olive trees. Rock paintings have even been discovered

in the central Sahara that date to around the year 3,000 BC,

and depict lush vegetation and abundant animals

in areas where today there's nothing but desert.

But as the planet tilted on its endless cycle,

this landscape's days were numbered. The rains gradually left the region. The

large plant life would have died off first

until only grasses remained, and then eventually

the grass, too, would have died. Without plant cover to absorb the heat of the

sun or roots to hold together the earth, the

topsoil would have dried up and blown away in the wind.

Slowly, these green valleys turned into arid grasslands,

then to desert, and finally, to the enormous Sahara that we know

today. Neolithic people fled from the steady

advance of this great desert. It drove them out of the Sahara and

concentrated them at its edges. Some of them fled to the northeast and

settled in the fertile Nile Valley where they

would lay the foundation for the civilization of the pharaohs.

But others went south and built a civilization of their own.

Much of this story will take place in a landscape

just to the south of the Sahara, known today

as the Sahel. The word derives from the Arabic

'sahil' which means ‘coast’ or ‘shore’. That's because early people thought of

the place as the coast of the great sea of sand that stretches for nearly

2,000 kilometers until it meets the Mediterranean.

The Sahel is a zone of transition; it's neither the desert sand to the

north nor the tropical savannah to the south.

For most of its 5,000-kilometer length from the Red Sea to the Atlantic coast,

it's a landscape of semi-arid grasslands and steps,

broken by thorns, scrub land, and patches of acacia trees.

Much of the life here relies on regular monsoon rains.

During the long dry season, many trees here lose their leaves

and the annual grasses die away. Several species of gazelle and buffalo

compete here with large predators like the cheetah and lion,

along with the African wild dog, but there are also spots of incredible

richness in this otherwise arid landscape. The

source of this richness can be seen from outer space.

From its source in the mountainous highlands of southeastern Guinea,

West Africa's longest river runs inland for over 4,000

kilometers in a dramatic, sweeping sickle shape. This is the Niger River.

Its name is thought to come from the Berber phrase

'ger-n-ger' meaning 'river of rivers'. The Niger River

is exceptionally fertile. At its thickest point

it is nearly a kilometer across, and it floods every year

across a vast area that turns the desert green.

In fact, its cultivation zone is more than five

times the size of the ones surrounding Egypt's Nile River,

allowing the people who live here to grow rice,

millet, and couscous for half of the year. The medieval West African chronicle,

known as the Tarikh al-fataash, paints a glowing

picture of the wealth and beauty of this region.

Mali encompasses a region of 400 towns and its soil is extremely rich. Among the

kingdoms of the sovereigns of the world, only the lands of Syria surpass it in

its beauty. Its inhabitants are rich and live very

well. According to oral tradition, the story of

human settlement along the Niger River begins with a people known as the Sorko.

They built settlements along the riverbank and fashioned boats

from African mahogany. They were soon joined

by a people known as the Gao, skilled hunters

who knew how to bring down hippopotamus and even crocodiles

living in the river. These were joined by the Doh people who had adapted to

life-cultivating crops in the rich floodplains.

Finally, a hardy people from the north moved into the region. They were the

first to ride horses here, and they called themselves the Songhai.

From the very beginning, this was a blended society

that survived by unifying formerly disparate elements

into a successful whole. The riverboats of the Sorko,

the hunting skills of the Gao, and the Doh's farming acumen,

all supercharged with the power of the horse,

all combined to form the beginning of a complex

and connected society that would forever use

the River Niger as its lifeblood. But their journey from these humble

beginnings would not be easy or straightforward.

Over recorded history, a number of great empires rose up in West Africa.

I think we should pause for a moment and ask what is an

empire? An empire is a violent phenomenon. It occurs

when one kingdom or state becomes more powerful than its

neighbor. It then invades and conquers them

and rules over both territories by force. The original nation, what's known as the

imperial center, will usually extract resources and

wealth from their conquered subject, and it may also make some attempt to

impose its culture and way of life on them.

Empires grow in this way, absorbing neighbours

and turning them into so-called client states.

They become more powerful but they also, as is usually the case, grow more

unstable. Then eventually, the bubble bursts.

Whether through poor leadership, economic collapse,

or imperial overreach, the empire falters and weakens. The client states

demand their freedom. The power that held the imperial center together

fails, and the whole edifice cracks like an eggshell.

This is often a time of great unrest. The once-mighty capital city might even

go down in flames, but for its most powerful

client states, the lack of central authority

might represent an opportunity. They might begin to expand their own

territory; they might build an empire of their own.

There are many theories about how exactly empires grow and operate,

but this simplified account is what has been called 'the Imperial

cycle' and I think it's useful to think about this

when we look at the history of West Africa.

Some empires of this region will follow this cycle exactly,

while others will try with limited success

to break it.

The first empire to grow here was the Empire of

Ghana. It rose up on the fringes of the Sahara Desert

around the 8th century. Its people pioneered ironworking in the region,

giving them a military edge, and it's clear that by

the year 1,000, Ghana had conquered a large number of

client states at its borders and begun to build a true empire.

The secret to Ghana's success relied on one thing

that would prove essential to all the empires that would follow

after. Actually, it's not a thing, but an animal.

Until around the year 300, horses were the main mode of transportation in

West Africa. A horse, while strong and fast on

hard ground, is poorly suited to the harsh

environment and shifting sands of the desert.

In July and August, daytime temperatures in the Sahara

can reach 50 degrees centigrade, or over 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

The desert is also prone to sandstorms.

The most deadly of these is known as the simoom,

or poison wind. These hot, dry winds reach temperatures of up

to 54 degrees centigrade, or over 130 Fahrenheit, which is hot

enough to scald the skin. These simooms

are known to cause rapid onset heat stroke in desert travelers,

since they can transfer more heat to the human body

than it's possible to lose through the evaporation of sweat.

This causes the body to quickly overheat, and major organs begin to fail.

But from the 4th century onwards, a remarkable new innovation

began arriving from Arabia. It was an animal with large, flat feet,

and adaptations that made them perfectly adapted for survival in the heat.

Among these was the distinctive hump on their back.

The camel had arrived in West Africa. The introduction of camels transformed

the economy of the Sahara. They could carry enormous weights of up

to 150 kilograms, and this meant that large-scale trade

was now possible across the desert. The West African

economy at this time was already flourishing but now it was

suddenly linked up to the rich markets of the Mediterranean,

and the result was the beginning of a new era

for both peoples. Trade across the Sahara relied on a

system of caravans which were vast trains of camels piled

high with goods and luxuries. According to the 14th

century Arab writer Ibn Battuta, the average size of

these caravans was around 1,000 camels, but they

could grow as large as 12,000. They would

have been an incredible sight, snaking across the

red sands of the desert for miles. There were three main routes

across the central Sahara through most of its history, and they

zigzagged between oases in the desert.

An oasis was a spot where an aquifer or an underground river,

often coupled with a layer of impermeable rock below the sand,

caused fresh water to appear on the surface of the desert.

Over millennia, humans settled on these oases

and in these small pockets, they reversed the process

that led the Sahara to form in the first place.

They first planted groves of hardy date palms

that then provided shade for smaller trees like apricots,

figs, and olives.

These oases formed crucial stopping points along the trade routes over the

desert. They were so important that military

control of these tiny settlements could often mean control over an entire

trade route and all its accompanying wealth.

Today, traveling at high speed in a modern car,

these trade routes would represent a non-stop drive

of over 70 hours. But for travellers in the Middle Ages,

with their vast herds of camel, it took roughly

two months to cross the desert. These journeys were so long

that about a third of the camels on the caravan were there simply to carry

supplies for the journey. In these conditions, even the camels

struggled. After their journeys, the animals had to

spend months recuperating; a four-month round trip would usually

earn them an eight-month rest afterwards.

The kingdoms of West Africa used these desert trails

to transport ivory, spices, wheat, and exotic animals to Europe, as well

as a steady trade in slaves.

The transatlantic slave trade that we're all familiar with from history books,

shipped millions of African slaves to the Americas

over roughly 400 years. It was exceptional in its scale and

brutality, but it wasn't the beginning of slavery.

In fact, forms of slavery have existed probably since the beginning

of agricultural society. Ancient Rome, Greece, and Carthage were all famously

slave societies, and with the collapse of the Roman

Empire in Europe and its ensuing chaos, slave-taking only increased.

But with the gradual Christianization of Europe in the first millennium,

the church began to introduce rules about keeping other

Christians as slaves.

By the year 1000, slavery of Christians by

Christians had more or less ended in feudal Europe,

although it's worth mentioning that it was replaced by the widespread system of

serfdom, where peasant workers were little better

than slaves, and could still be bought and sold by

feudal lords.

But the keeping of non-Christian slaves was still allowed,

and persisted right through the middle ages.

When Christian kingdoms went to war with the kingdoms of the Muslim world,

prisoners of war were constantly being taken as slaves by both sides.

But for both Muslims and Christians, sub-Saharan Africa

was the source of a seemingly infinite supply of forced labourers.

Since the first trade routes across the Sahara began,

the lands of the north began extracting Africa's manpower

by force. These slaves were transported across the desert under

horrendous conditions and were sold in the slave markets of

North Africa in the Byzantine Empire, and in Venice

and Spain. They were often used as labourers and

servants, but they were also forced to fight as

soldiers in one medieval army or another. While slavery is deeply unpleasant

to consider, it was an unfortunate fact of life in

this time, and it will be important to acknowledge its effect

on the history of this region if we are to make any sense at all

of what happens next.

More valuable than slave laborers, ivory, or spices, was the natural resource

that occurred in West Africa with an abundance unparalleled

around the known world, and that resource was gold.

Gold has always done something strange to the human brain;

something about its warm color and reflective surface

has always made us desire it. We want to wear it on our bodies and decorate our

buildings with it, and we've structured entire economies

around it. This rare, precious metal, more than any

other, has always suggested to us a kind of

divinity. The ancient Egyptians called gold 'the

breath of God' while the Aztecs called it 'the sweat of

the sun'. These early ideas of gold as a metal

sent from heaven are actually not that far from the truth.

Like most heavy metals, gold was forged in the center of stars

by the process of nuclear fusion. Stars, just like empires, pass through a

cycle. They grow and grow until they reach the

size that we call a supergiant, thousands of times larger

than our own sun. After this, it enters into a death

spiral. Most stars simply shed their outer

layers and fizzle out, but some, perhaps less

than one percent, achieve a mass that means they explode

in a supernova, a burst of energy and light that can be

equivalent for a few moments to the brightness of

an entire galaxy. It's in these explosions that gold

is formed.

From around 200 million years after our planet first formed,

gold started raining from the sky, carried

on asteroids that bombarded the earth's surface.

West Africa is remarkably rich in this rare element.

In fact, until the discovery of the Americas in the 16th century,

this region was the world's top producer of gold.

So much gold left Africa during this time that Europeans and Arabs

began to believe that it must be home to a single

monumental gold mine, a mountain of gold that was being intentionally kept a

secret by African kings. This idea would later inspire myths like

the story of King Solomon's mines, but actually, the reality was quite the

opposite. Gold in West Africa wasn't mined from a

single source but from countless tiny gold mines and

panning stations across the land.

Gold usually occurs in flecks and nuggets

found within quartz crystals. Over time, the crystals are eroded by the

running water of rivers and streams, and the flecks of gold run free.

The majority of West Africa's gold wasn't dug out of a mine,

but panned on the banks of the Senegal and Niger Rivers.

The extremely variable climate of the region also helped this industry.

That's because during the long dry season when all plant life

died and agriculture was impossible, many farmers

would hang up their farm tools and go prospecting for gold instead.

The 10th century Iranian geographer Ibn al-Faqih

seems to have heard some version of this process, as he relates

in his geography text "The Book of Lands". In Africa, gold grows in the sand like

carrots do, and is picked at sunrise.

These part-time prospectors would gather together their tiny amounts of gold dust

and wait for the trading caravans to pass through.

Due to the great variety of languages used in this part of the world,

these traders would often engage in a practice known

as silent barter. They would lay out their goods

on rugs; ornaments and tools, foods, spices, and most importantly, salt,

which is hard to come by in sub-Saharan Africa

and was crucial for preserving food. The traders would then beat on large

drums and blow trumpets, and withdraw out of sight. The local

amateur gold miners would emerge and place their little nuggets and flecks of

gold in front of the goods they wanted,

offering what they thought they were worth.

The traders would then return and if they accepted the price,

they would take the gold. They would then travel

north and exchange it with North African traders

who would give them more salt and exotic, Mediterranean goods in return.

Soon, a veritable river of gold flowed north

across the desert. Through this system,

the early kingdoms of West Africa swelled

to eye-watering wealth.

To give you a sense of the kind of wealth we're talking about, it's worth

looking at the example of one of Africa's most famous medieval

kings.

His name has gone down in history as Mansa Musa,

the wealthiest man in the world.

The Empire of Ghana, which had ruled much of West Africa for 500 years,

went into decline at some point during the 13th century.

It passed through the final stages of that imperial

cycle we talked about; its power weakened, its client states demanded independence,

and finally, one of its own conquered subjects

eclipsed it in power, snapping up its old dominions,

and seizing control of the lucrative Saharan trade routes.

This was the beginning of a new empire. Eventually, even the Ghanaian Kingdom was

absorbed into this rising power, and it would become known as the Empire

of Mali.

The Mali Empire inherited much of the wealth and power of its predecessor,

but it developed the system of trans-Saharan trade

to eye-watering size. Its most famous king, Mansa Musa,

was a genius of public relations. He was so famous that he even appears on

a medieval European map known as the Catalan Atlas, holding a

gold coin and wearing a gold crown.

Mansa Musa's journey to become the King of Mali

is probably one of the strangest stories of royal succession

in history.

The year was 1312. Musa was an elite member of the Mali

court, serving an eccentric old king named Abu

Bakr II. Musa was around the age of 32 when he

was summoned to see the king. The king told him that Musa would be

appointed as deputy and rule in the king's place while he

was away. This was a common enough event, as kings

who went off on campaign or pilgrimage would often appoint

deputies to rule in their place. But it's where the king was going that

must have raised at least a few eyebrows.

Towards the end of his reign, the old king Abu Bakr

became convinced that it would be possible to sail

far enough across the Atlantic Ocean that he might reach the other side.

In fact, he became obsessed with this idea.

The Arab historian Shihab al-Umari once spoke to Mansa Musa and recounts the

king's version of what happened next.

The ruler before me believed that it was possible to reach the end of the ocean

that encircles the earth, so he equipped 200 boats full of men and

gold, water, and food enough for several years.

He ordered the admiral not to return until they reached the end of the ocean.

They set out. Their absence extended over a long period of time,

and at last, only one boat returned.

The sailors on this boat brought back a tale

of a great whirlpool that had sucked the fleet down beneath the waves,

leaving only their vessel afloat. Most likely, the fleet was wrecked during

an Atlantic storm, but this whirlpool may have also been

the formidable Canary Current that flows down the African continent.

But the King Abu Bakr was not deterred, and he seems to have decided that if you

want a job done, you should do it yourself.

This time, he ordered 2,000 boats to be equipped for him and for his men,

and 1,000 more for water and food. Then he departed with his men on the

awesome trip, never to return.

This story has long fascinated historians of West Africa.

Of course, Abu Bakr would be proved right by history;

other lands really did lie beyond the ocean,

and with the passage of only a few centuries, the fate of Africa

would become inextricably tied to those lands.

Some historians have slightly fancifully searched for evidence

that Abu Bakr II may have actually reached the new world

nearly 200 years before Columbus, but there is no

real evidence for this. What's more, the only account we have of this story

was the one given by the new King Mansa Musa. As we'll

find out later, kings can often be a little cagey about

how exactly their predecessors met their

ends. Still, the storyteller in me finds it an

irresistible anecdote to mention. Something about the pure weirdness

of it does tempt me to believe it, that this immensely wealthy king, not

satisfied with the things of this world, sailed out into the ocean on an

impossible quest, and drowned somewhere on his way to a

new one.

Whatever the circumstances of his rise to power, we do know that Musa was a

fearsomely effective ruler. During his reign, he expanded the Mali

Empire and conquered a further 24 cities, folding them into the largest

Empire that Africa had ever seen. But one event would secure his place in

history. It will show the talent he had for

self-promotion, and would ensure that his name was on

the lips of Europeans and Arabs for centuries to come, and that was his

eye-wateringly expensive pilgrimage to Mecca.

As is always the case, it's not just goods that flow up and down trade routes.

Human cultures also travel along them too,

and with the increasing traffic of trade across the Sahara,

West Africa was slowly being introduced to new

and exotic ways of life. Chief among these foreign imports was

the Arab culture, and along with it, the young religion of

Islam.

For the early kings of Mali, converting to Islam

was an entry point into the world of the Mediterranean coast.

It was a way to gain acceptance and influence among these various

powerful kingdoms.

The first Malian king we can reliably say was a Muslim

was named Sundiata Keita, and he ruled in the first half of the 13th century,

nearly a hundred years before Musa. But religion would always form a

fracture that ran the whole length of West African society,

dividing the rich from the poor, and city dwellers

from the countryside.

The people living in the farms and villages of West Africa,

the people who worked the land and herded the cattle,

were what we call animists. That means, loosely speaking, that they worshipped

their ancestors alongside the ancient spirits of nature

and the magic that lived in the mountaintops and the forests.

The Muslim chronicles record these kinds of beliefs

with barely concealed contempt.

They worship idols among trees and stones.

They make sacrifices to them and pray to them for their needs.

Among these people are diviners and sorcerers.

But in the cities, Islam was the dominant religion,

at least in name. For a West African citizen

of this time, becoming a Muslim had a number of benefits.

It helped you to build a rapport and trade with the foreigners who arrived

from across the desert, and at times, it allowed people to avoid

certain taxes. It also shielded people from the

increasingly bold slave-taking raiders who came down from

the Sahara. Just like in Christian Europe, under

Islamic law, it was illegal for a Muslim to take

another Muslim as a slave. This prohibition was taken very

seriously. The 14th century Islamic scholar

Makhluf al-balbali was one of the first to set this law in

writing.

Anyone who is known to be from those lands, which are known to be the lands of

Islam, and who mentions he is from those lands,

should be let go and should be adjudged free. This was the

ruling of the jurists of Andalusia.

Legal disputes would even erupt periodically

over whether it was allowed to sell slaves who had converted after being

captured. For the kingdom of Mali as a whole,

converting to Islam offered similar protections. Again,

similar to Christian Europe, Muslim kings were only supposed to go to war when it

was legally sanctioned. A legal war of this kind was known as a

jihad, or holy struggle. Legal approval

would rarely be given for a war against another Muslim nation.

By the time Mansa Musa took the throne, Mali

had been a Muslim empire for over a hundred years.

But Musa was a devout Muslim and would go on to forge

strong and enduring links with the rest of the Muslim world. He finally

made a pilgrimage to Mecca that began in the year 1324.

But even on this religious duty, Musa seems to have had a keen eye for his

image. He reportedly traveled with an

impressive retinue that caused a sensation across the

medieval world. He was accompanied by a caravan

consisting of 60,000 men, including a personal retinue of 12,000

slaves, all carrying golden staffs and wearing

brocade and Persian silk. He's also supposed to have traveled

with a baggage train of 80 camels, each carrying

300 pounds of gold. At today's market rates,

that would be a value of around 500 million,

or half a billion dollars.

At every city he stopped at, Mansa Musa handed out this gold to the poor

in huge amounts, but his generosity had a number of inadvertent effects.

All along his pilgrimage route, he left economic chaos in his wake.

In the cities of Cairo, Medina, and Mecca that he passed through,

the sudden influx of gold caused a collapse in the metal's value for the

next decade, causing enormous inflation and

devastating their economies. On his way home, perhaps a little bashful

at the devastation he had caused, Musa loaned back all the gold he could

find in Egypt in an attempt to somewhat stabilize the

price. It's the first and last time in history

that one man has controlled the price of all the world's gold. But the Empire of Mali,

while incredibly wealthy, wasn't to last. It would soon follow Ghana's footsteps

along that imperial cycle. 0ne of its client states, which was

only just beginning to flex its muscles, would soon become the true subject of

this episode, and the largest empire in African

history. That state, finally, was the kingdom

of Songhai.

I think this is a good point to mention that there are essentially three groups

of sources about the history of this region of West

Africa, and they can often give wildly divergent

versions of events. The first source

is the Arab travelers and historians who occasionally crossed the Sahara

and wrote about what they saw. Of these, two stand out for the length and detail

of their descriptions. One of these is the traveller Ibn Battuta.

He was the Moroccan Marco Polo. Over a period of 30 years in the 14th century,

he traveled all over the Middle East, North and sub-Saharan Africa,

then through Afghanistan and Central Asia,

India and Sri Lanka, and even on to China. It's on one of these great journeys

that he explored the kingdoms of West Africa

during the time of the Mali Empire. Nearly two centuries later, in the early

16th century, another traveler, a Spanish Moor who

would become known as Leo Africanus, travelled in West Africa.

Afterwards, he was captured by European pirates

and taken to Rome where he was forced to convert to Christianity.

There, he wrote down accounts of all his travels.

But visitors of this kind are few and far between.

Each one acts like a kind of snapshot, capturing a moment in time, and they can

sometimes be frustratingly vague about the kinds

of things that are interesting to a modern historian.

The second source of information is the storytelling tradition of West Africa

itself. This region is home to a unique tradition of

folklore presided over by a mysterious cast of mystics and holy

men known as the griots. For millennia,

these griots have played the roles of storyteller,

historian, singer, poet, and musician, all together in West African society.

These griots were repositories of an oral tradition,

memorizing their stories and histories, and passing them on from one generation

to another. They were treated as wise men and

magicians, too, and often held positions as advisors to

the kings and rulers. You're currently listening to a pair of

griots from the town of Yelekela in modern Mali,

still practicing this ancient tradition today.

Like most of the world's folklore traditions, the stories of the griots

were often not written down until the 19th century.

Between different regions today, the stories of griots can differ greatly,

and while they are an invaluable piece of cultural heritage,

as a historian, they can often prove a frustrating source of information.

To the griots, the boundary between history and myth

is very thin. Their histories include fantastical stories

full of sorcerers and magic, but they are an incredible source

for learning about how the people of this region perceive their own history.

Studies of their folklore have been used comparatively

to corroborate or strengthen other sources.

The final source is a kind of mixture of these two traditions,

and that's the scribes of Timbuktu. We'll talk much more about Timbuktu

later, but for now, I'll only say that it was a

library city on the edge of the desert. It was home

to a serious scholarly tradition where scribes and learned men were trained.

They were connected to an international network of intellectuals

which stretched from the libraries of Baghdad and Alexandria

to the mosques of Cordoba in Spain. The scribes of Timbuktu were genuinely

interested in recording history; some of them even travelled with West

African kings with the express purpose of writing down

the events they saw. Two of the most prominent works by these

scribes are known as the Timbuktu chronicles.

They are the Tariq al-fataash and the Tariq al-Sudan;

the chronicle of the seeker, and the chronicle of

Africa, and you'll hear a lot more from both

throughout this episode. Although many of the scholarly families

of Timbuktu traced their lineage back to Arab

Muslims, many of them were also West African, and

they were steeped in the ancient traditions and folklore

of the people around them. Although they liked to pretend that they

were, they weren't immune from the influence of the griots,

those magical storytellers, and this comes through in the histories

of the Timbuktu chronicles which are full of prophecies and dream

visions, magical stories where men can turn into

animals, and kings can talk with demons.

The Tariq al-fataash, for instance, recounts one origin story

for the Songhai people. It relates how they were once ruled by a king who

was half-fish and half-man, who every night swam up the

Niger River and terrorized his subjects.

Finally, a hero overthrows this fish-man and becomes the Songhai's first king.

But the scribe of the chronicle relates some of these stories

with a slight sense of embarrassment, and even includes

this anxious disclaimer.

Most of the tales we have recounted are almost certainly not true.

We ask forgiveness from God the Most High.

Another thing to mention is that both these chronicles

were also political documents. They were written on the orders of kings,

so they often massage history into a shape that casts these kings in

the most flattering light. But if we apply their accounts

cautiously, overlapping them both and placing them

in conversation with other sources, they are also invaluable for learning

about what happened during this time. So, these are the sources we have to rely

on, the fragmentary, unreliable accounts of

Arab travelers in the region, the griot storytellers who still spin

tales of the ancient times, and the scribes of Timbuktu, desperately

trying to make sense of it all, with a king breathing over their

shoulder.

Because of the naturally unreliable nature of all of these sources,

the history of this region is filled with many gaps and blank spaces,

many questions and uncertainties that I will attempt to navigate

as we go forwards.

The earliest written records mentioning the Kingdom of Songhai

appear in the 10th century. They mention a small kingdom on the

banks of the Niger River, and for much of its history, that's all

it was. Songhai centered around the city of Gao,

a great trading terminus where the expanse of the Sahara

met the green floodplain of the Niger. Just outside of Gao, a great sand dune

looms over the skyline. It's known as the Rose Dune due to the reddish

color it turns at sunrise, and since ancient

times, it has been thought to be the home of

sorcerers who are supposed to meet there after dark

to perform their rituals and spells. Despite Islam being officially

adopted by the royal court of Songhai as early as the year 1019, the city of

Gao would always retain something of that

character. More than perhaps any other city in the

region, it still retained a deep-seated

connection to the ancient ways of Africa.

Gao was a great cosmopolitan marketplace where African cola nuts, gold, ivory,

slaves, spices, palm oil, and precious woods

were traded for Mediterranean goods like salt,

textiles, weapons, horses, and the metal copper.

Gao was what's known as an entrepot or entry port, the terminus of a vast array

of trade routes which spread out from it like a web.

The explorer Leo Africanus, who visited Gao in the 16th century,

writes about the rich trade he saw arriving from Europe.

It is a wonder to see the quality of merchandise that is daily brought here,

and how costly and sumptuous everything is.

Horses purchased in Europe for 10 ducats are sold here for 40 and sometimes 50

ducats apiece. There is not European cloth so coarse as

to sell for less than four ducats per cubit. A cubit of the scarlet of Venice,

or of Turkish cloth, is here worth 30 ducats.

A sword is here valued at three or four crowns,

and likewise, are spears, bridles, and similar commodities,

and spices are all sold at a high rate. However,

of all other items, salt is the most expensive.

While gold was universally used for trade,

there was also another type of currency that was widespread in this region;

these were cowrie shells, the shells of a type of sea snail that occurs most

commonly in the Indian Ocean. These small shells served much the same

purpose as gold. They were beautiful enough to be

universally desired, and they were rare enough to be safe

repositories of value. They acted like coins in the era before

coins were minted and today, the classical Chinese symbol for money

even derives from a stylized drawing of one of these shells.

Whether measured in gold or in cowries, by the year 1325, the wealth of the city

of Gao had swollen it to such a degree that

Mansa Musa, the richest man in the world, and the

emperor of Mali desired to seize it. Musa

soon ordered his armies to march against Gao and absorb it

into his empire. In the preceding centuries, the wealth of

Mali had turned it into a powerful military

machine. If accounts are to be believed, Mali at

this time had an army of 100,000 soldiers, including

10,000 horsemen. These were drawn from the aristocracy,

just like European knights. Iron working as a craft had been

perfected in the empire of Ghana so that now, whole clans of Mali's

Mandinke people were given over to it, responsible for

creating the spearheads, swords, and arrows used by the imperial

army. Mali's soldiers wore leather helmets and

sometimes iron chainmail imported from Arabia.

A certain proportion of this army were likely slave

soldiers. Most would have been conscripted citizens,

but many were also professional soldiers. Mali's army also incorporated

specialist fighters from the different territories that made

up the empire. Oral historians recount the use of

poison bowmen from the Sankharani river in the south,

fire archers from Wagadou to the north, and heavy cavalry from the northern

state of Mema. Against this force, the small city-state

of Gao would have had little chance. It was soon

folded into the Empire of Mali, but by all accounts,

Gao did quite well as a client state of this greater power.

The Arab explorer Ibn Battuta visited Gao

28 years later, in 1353. In his writings, he is often quite

scathing about Africa. He was scandalized by many of the

customs of Mali's people and what he perceived to be the rudeness

of their manners. For instance, at one point in his

writings, he turns up his nose at the food offered to him by a local

chief.

The meal was served, some pounded millet mixed with a little honey and milk.

This convinced me that there was no good to be hoped for from these people,

and I made up my mind to travel back to Morocco at once.

So, I think it's telling that when he saw the walls,

the gates, and the mosques of Gao, as well as the rich surplus of food kept in its

store houses, the sight seems to have impressed him

greatly. Then I travel to the town of Gao which

is a great town on the Niger, one of the finest, biggest, and most

fertile cities of Africa. There is much rice there, and milk, and

chickens, and fish, and the cucumber which has no like.

While for a time the Empire of Mali seemed invincible,

there were a number of great weaknesses hiding just beneath its surface,

and all it took for those to emerge was for the great king

Mansa Musa to pass away.

One of the greatest challenges any society faced up until very recently

was that of royal succession. For most of history, countries have been

ruled by kings, but when a king died, the question over

who would rule his kingdom could become a lethal matter.

If the king had an heir or named a successor, this person would have a

strong claim, but he would need to command an

overwhelming body of support from the lords and

nobles and other stakeholders in the kingdom.

But if a king died without an heir, then multiple challengers might present

themselves. In the worst cases, the country would

divide itself among the challengers and this would lead to a war.

If all the wars of succession and history are taken into account,

we could probably find no greater waste of resources and time,

let alone human life and suffering. Civil wars routinely brought countries

to their knees, destroyed their industries, and decimated

their populations. In many ways, they represented a greater

danger than any plague, earthquake, or famine,

and the people of this time lived in constant fear of them.

In Europe, kings were terrified of dying without

having produced a son, but in West Africa, the problem was usually not too few sons,

but too many. West African kings usually had multiple

wives, with four being allowed under medieval

laws, so the chance of a king dying without an

heir was much less than in Europe. According to the chronicles, one Songhai

king named Askiya Muhammed would have 37 sons during his reign,

while the oral tradition places the number at closer to 500.

The problem wasn't only with sons fighting over the crown;

large families meant that any king usually had a

great number of brothers who may have fancied a hand at

being king themselves, and with so many potential claimants to the throne,

it would have been utterly essential to have clear

and universally agreed upon laws about who should be king.

That's exactly what the kingdoms of West Africa

didn't have.

Those laws that did exist were elaborate and needlessly complicated,

so when a king died, there were often multiple interpretations

of who should take the throne. This is something we'll see happen

over and over throughout this episode. In times of peace, during the long reigns

of its great kings, West Africa flourished. But the death of

its kings virtually always led to disaster.

In Mali, the great king Mansa Musa died in the year 1337, and the first to

replace him was his son Maghan. But Musa also had a

brother, a man named Suleyman.

Musa's son Maghan ruled for only four years

before his uncle struck, killing Maghan and taking the throne for himself.

Such an illegitimate act enraged the lords of the kingdom,

and they each brought forth their contesting claims for the throne.

What followed was a succession crisis that destroyed the unity of the empire.

Suddenly, Mali's strong, united army splintered into factions and it began to

fight itself. Perhaps

sensing weakness in the once great empire,

horsemen from the land of Mossi to the south crossed the Niger River

and began raiding around the city of Timbuktu.

Wracked by civil war, the Malians were unable to react,

and the raids on their borders got bolder.

Soon, the client states of the empire took notice.

One of them was the distant coastal Kingdom of Jolof

which was the first to declare independence.

When Mali failed to march on Jolof and restore it to the empire,

other client states who wanted independence saw their chance.

Mali had always been a single ethnicity project;

while it ruled over a large variety of regions and tribes,

its kings and social elite were all drawn from a people

known as the Mande. They used the empire to project their power over the other

groups, and this meant at the first sign of

trouble, these other groups would seek to throw off the yoke of

Mande rule. Suleyman, the uncle who had killed Mansa

Musa's son, soon died himself, and passed the throne

to his son. He was in turn overthrown by another who

was overthrown by another. During this crisis, the average king

ruled for barely more than a few years, and the authority of the empire

collapsed. Its client states broke free in droves,

and one of these states was the wealthy trade city of Gao.

At this time, the king in Mali was a man named Musa II,

but he was king in name only. He had an advisor and counselor known

as Mari Djata who appears to have been the true power in the empire.

At one point, Mari Djata even threw the young king in a jail cell

to keep him out of the way.

Because of this remarkable situation, and the decades of civil war and financial

mismanagement, in places like Gao, the legitimacy of the

Mali Empire must have been at an all-time low.

Mali's eastern provinces were now in open rebellion,

and it's at this point that the city of Gao declared independence.

For the royal vizier Mari Djata, the loss of this great city,

more than any other of his rebellious client states,

must have been a huge blow. He must have been determined

to crush this rebellion. He immediately dispatched

the great Malian army to restore order in the east,

and the army had some success. They recaptured Takedda,

an important copper mining town in the north,

but when they reached Gao, the newly formed Kingdom of Songhai

put up a much greater fight. By this time, Gao had seized large territories in the

east, strengthening their power. They may have

also gathered together other elements of the resistance against

Mali, forming a kind of rebel alliance.

They relied on guerrilla warfare, raiding Mali's urban

centers, often using riverboats on the Niger

to deliver large amounts of troops right where they would be most effective,

attacking swiftly and by surprise. These tactics allowed the Kingdom of

Songhai to tie up the larger but weakened

army of Mali, and a sort of stalemate seems to have set in.

But this war wouldn't end on the battlefield,

but with the endless churn of royal murders

that had swept the empire. The sickly King Musa II died in 1387.

He may have still been imprisoned and he may not have died naturally.

Either way, the royal vizier Mari Djata refused to give up power. He killed

Musa's brothers and ascended to the throne himself.

He ruled for only a year before being assassinated.

More provinces revolted; the Mossi people attacked the Mali Empire again, and soon

invasion by the nomadic Tuareg people from the desert

meant that Mali lost access to the northern trade routes across the Sahara.

This meant it could no longer import enough horses to supply its army,

let alone fund its expensive wars. For the next century, Mali would be

locked in a life or death struggle for its very survival.

In this period of chaos, the empire completely fell apart,

and the rebellious city of Gao was forgotten.

The Kingdom of Songhai was fully established by the 1430s.

The wheel of the imperial cycle turned.

Out of all this chaos, the young Kingdom of Songhai

saw an opportunity to rise from the old empire's ashes.

The next century saw the continuing decline of Mali

and the rise of Songhai. As the end of the 15th century drew near,

this new kingdom was poised to become one of Africa's great powers.

One man, a ruthless and fearsome military leader,

was about to take full advantage of the opportunity that this chaos had created.

His name was Sunni Ali.

Sunni Ali is perhaps the most controversial character

in African history. We know little about his early life, who he was, or where he

came from. But what's clear is that he was a fierce

military leader, a man of limitless energy and ambition.

He took the throne of the Kingdom of Songhai in the year

1464, and his reign would mark an unprecedented expansion of

this kingdom so that it would soon extend further

than the Empire of Mali ever had.

But Sunni Ali is remembered very differently

by the two sides of Songhai society. In the oral tradition of the griots, he

is remembered as Ali Ber or Ali the Great.

In the stories of the griots, he is a great and wise man

who commanded the powers of magic, the first ever

emperor of the Songhai. But in the chronicles written by Muslim scholars,

he is remembered as a cruel and tyrannical ruler.

The chronicle Tarikh al-fataash reserves particular condemnation for him.

The tyrant, the cursed, the oppressor; the Sunni Ali, a model of shameful

conduct.

It's true that from virtually the moment he took power,

Sunni Ali went to war.

He was determined to modernize and reorganize his military.

He had seen the Mali Empire collapse after its access to horses fell apart,

and so, he resolved to begin the large-scale breeding of horses in

Africa. He built large stables to shelter these horses

from the elements and from the disease- -carrying tsetse fly,

and he pioneered the use of crossbreeding to generate a breed of

sturdy horses well-suited to the African environment.

He also introduced the use of cavalry soldiers

wearing iron breastplates beneath their tunics.

These must have been difficult to wear in the African heat,

but they would have greatly increased the weight and strength of his cavalry.

One of his great passions was also the use of a river Navy.

He expanded the raiding boats that the Songhai had used in their rebellion

until the Songhai commanded a large fleet

of 400 boats that could transport troops up and down the Niger River at rapid

speeds. He named one of his generals the admiral

of this fleet, with the title Master of the Water.

He loved these boats so much that during one siege of the city of Jenne,

lying many kilometers away from the river, Sunni Ali

had a long canal dug so that his boats could continue supplying his men on the

siege lines. During this time, the Songhai abandoned

guerilla raids, instead taking on a more sustained and

aggressive style of warfare. The chronicle Tarikh al-Sudan recalls

the remarkable success that Sunni Ali enjoyed.

Ali was always victorious, pillaging every land on which he fixed his choice.

Wherever he was present, his armies were never defeated. From Kanta

to Sibi-rid-ugu, his horses ran over all these lands.

Part of the success of his campaign seems to have been his extreme

ruthlessness, which we get some sense of through the

Timbuktu chronicles. From the Mongols to the Assyrians,

military leaders throughout history have used terror as a weapon, and it can

be an effective military tactic. If your

enemy are terrified of you, they may be more likely to run away and

throw down their weapons, saving you time and resources in your

conquests. Ali seems to have used this tactic to

great effect, but I think some of the acts attributed to him

go beyond this use of tactical brutality. One example is his treatment of a tribe

known as the Fulbe, and he seems to have reserved a

particular and unexplained hatred for these people.

When they rebelled against their Songhai conquerors, Sunni Ali marched on them

and had them executed en masse, so that if the chronicles are to be believed,

their remaining population could fit beneath the shade of a single tree.

His mood changed rapidly; he flew in and out of rages,

sometimes condemning people to death, only later to change his mind and let

them go free. Because of this unpredictable and at

times brutal nature, Sunni Ali is described using an

astonishing array of nicknames in the great chronicles of Timbuktu.

Ali the Merciless. The Degenerate. The Accursed. The Great Tyrant.

Arrogant One. Ali the Godless. The Profligate. Cold-hearted. The Despotic

One. Arrogant One. The Shedder of Blood.

The Notorious Evildoer. The Killer of so Many People

That Only God the Most High Knows the Number.

The chronicles even attribute to him a number of actions

that begin to sound almost cartoonishly villainous.

His heart was so hard that he once threw a baby into a mortar

and forced the mother to grind it even while the baby was still alive.

The flesh was then fed to the horses. His acts of cruelty

were so numerous that it would be impossible to record them all in a

single volume.

It's at this point that I should introduce a note of caution about these

characterizations; it's certainly possible that Ali was

just as ruthless and bloodthirsty as they say.

History, after all, is full of kings like this,

and it's not hard to see why. Recent research has found that today, up

to 20 percent of people found in the upper echelons of the

corporate business world exhibit signs of psychopathy compared to

only one in a hundred in the general population.

When violence was so often the key to power in the Middle Ages,

there's no reason to believe that this number would be any lower

among medieval kings. But to give Sunni Ali some credit,

it's worth pointing out that these chronicles were written after his death,

and on the order of kings who were trying to legitimize

their own line of succession. Part of the way they tried to do this

was to trash Sunni Ali's reputation. We should always bear in mind that these

chronicles were very much political tools,

an early form of propaganda for a new regime.

At times, Sunni Ali does seem to have understood the value of mercy.

Conquered tribes were ordered to join his army, swelling its numbers

until the Songhai Kingdom soon commanded a force of 40,000

infantry and 10,000 cavalry.

But whatever else we can say about him, it's clear that Sunni Ali

was a complicated man. Some historians have even questioned whether he suffered

from a personality disorder, but I think the least we can say is that

the violence of this king appears to have stemmed from a number of

deep-seated insecurities. Chief among these seems to have been a

hatred and distrust of scholars and their learning. It's not clear why

exactly Ali felt this way. Perhaps, like some politicians today, he

cultivated a kind of anti-elitist populism

which held knowledge and expertise in contempt.

There were many rumors circulating about him, too,

rumors that he was not really a Muslim, that he only paid

lip service to the religion. Perhaps he saw

these scholarly communities as the source of these rumors.

Perhaps, quite simply, he couldn't read and he hated those who could.

Whatever the reason, the effects were the same and they would come to bloody

fruition when Ali set his sights on perhaps the

greatest prize in all of western Africa, the great capital of scholars, the heart

of learning, the eternal library city of Timbuktu.

Timbuktu is an ancient city. In the European imagination, it has

become a metaphor for remoteness. When we say

‘all the way to Timbuktu’, we mean a place as far away as it is possible to get.

In fact, a survey conducted in 2006 found that over 30 percent of British

people believed that Timbuktu was a mythical place like Atlantis or

El Dorado.

Timbuktu began as a seasonal settlement about 15 kilometers north of the Niger

River. It was a place where traders could come

in from the desert and exchange salt, gold, ivory, and slaves.

Legend has it that this camp was centered around a well

owned by an old slave woman called Buktu, and so, it became known as ‘the place of

Buktu,’ Timbuktu. It became

a permanent settlement around the year 1100.

Under the Mali Empire, it grew to house a population of well over

100,000 which is double the population today,

and made it one of the largest cities in West Africa.

At its height, it was home to Arab, Italian, and Jewish merchants,

and the city taxed around a tenth of all the goods that passed through it,

a vast wealth that led to an astonishing flourishing of culture,

and above all, literacy. Timbuktu has the perfect climate for

producing and keeping books. Books here

were written on sheepskins, on tree bark, and on paper imported from Italy, and the

dry desert air meant that their pages never warped or

cracked. Books were written here in countless

African languages like Songhai and Fulani, but also in

Arabic. Some were even illuminated with gold

leaf. Timbuktu's people saw these books as

symbols of wealth and power, and so, an active trade in literature

began with the rest of the Islamic world until hundreds of thousands of

manuscripts were collected here over the course of centuries.

The city of Gao was the administrative center

of West Africa, but Timbuktu was its intellectual center.

If Gao was the heart of the Sahel, then Timbuktu was its brain.

This was the city against which the ruthless Sunni Ali,

the great hater of books and learning, marched

in the year 1468.

Sunni Ali made no secret about his intentions

for the city of Timbuktu. He sent a messenger

into the city ahead of his army to deliver a chilling warning

to its remaining citizens. The medieval chronicle

Tarikh al-fataash recalls this event. The messenger arrived at midday. The drum

that he had brought with him was beaten and the crowd gathered around him.

Unsheathing a sword and brandishing it by the hilt,

he said, ‘This is the sword of the king. I have been ordered to cut the throat of

anyone who stays the night in this town.’ In the blink of an eye, all the town's

inhabitants fled. Some did not even take their supper that

night, while others forgot to bring blankets for sleeping.

The sun had still not set before Timbuktu was completely evacuated.

Most of the townsfolk fled without bothering to close the doors of their

houses. After the flight of its defenders, Ali

succeeded in capturing Timbuktu without much resistance, and he

was not merciful with the community of scholars who lived there.

Ali immediately ordered his soldiers to gather together all the books he could

find in the city and burned them in great bonfires.

Luckily, many of the scholars and wealthy families who fled

had taken their collections with them, saving

some proportion of this ancient collection.

Some also managed to hide their books in secret places,

but Sunni Ali executed any scholars who remained behind.

This is another time when Ali's cruelty just didn't seem to have a point to it.

There was no tactical reason to victimize these scholars.

It seems to have stemmed from something rooted deep in his personality,

something that we as historians can only guess at.

In fact, over the remaining 24 years of his reign,

Ali would embark on no fewer than five purges of the city,

attacking its noble families, destroying its books and schools,

and expelling its scholars. All of this, as you can imagine, led to a great amount

of resentment among the population. People must have begun to cry out for

some alternative to this tyrannical king, and if the chronicles are to be believed,

that alternative was already gathering power. His name

was Askiya Muhammed.

By anyone's standards, Muhammed had no legitimate claim to the throne.

He was a nobleman and a warrior who held a position in the Songhai Empire

known as the tondi-Fari, the lord of the mountains.

He was in control of the rocky hills and red

sandstone mountains to the south. This landscape is broken by an

incredible 500-meter tall cliff known as the

Bandiagara Escarpment that runs for 150 kilometers along the

modern border between Mali and Burkina Faso.

This was a tough region full of mountain bandits and hill tribes,

and it was also one of the most highly militarized borders in the empire,

facing the extensive lands of the powerful Mossi people in the south.

Due to all of this, Askiya Muhammed would have commanded a large

and battle-hardened army. He was in the top level of Songhai military command.

He knew how its army worked; its strengths,

and also, its weaknesses. Askiya Muhammed

also seems to have frequently clashed with the king

Sunni Ali. The chronicles never make clear the nature of these

disagreements, but Muhammed was even imprisoned and

sentenced to death on a number of occasions as the Tarikh

al-Sudan recalls. More than once, Sunni Ali condemned him

to death or imprisonment because of his stout heart and great

courage. But because he was wise and prudent,

the tyrant never did him any harm. It's possible they disagreed over

questions of military tactics, but everything else we know about

Muhammed gives us a picture of a thoughtful man,

a diplomat, and a shrewd statesman. So, it's possible

that he may have also protested against the terror tactics that Sunni Ali

employed, and had the king's rage rained down on

him as a consequence. Either way, it's clear that Askiya

Muhammed was a deadly mix for King Sunni Ali.

The Askiya was rebellious but he also seems to have been indispensable,

and he was steadily positioning himself as a true alternative to the tyrant king.

Soon enough, he would get his chance.

Sunni Ali died in November, 1492. How exactly this happened is a mystery.

In the Timbuktu chronicle Tarikh al-fataash,

his death is a divine intervention. He gets struck down by God as a

punishment for abusing a holy man, and this explanation should immediately

give us some cause for suspicion. In the other chronicle, the Tarikh al-

-Sudan, we get a slightly more realistic scenario.

In this version, Ali drowns when a flash flood of the Niger River

washes into his camp near the village of Kuna.

Of course, flash floods were a deadly fact of life on the medieval Niger

just as they are today, but this would have still been incredible bad luck

for a king. It's worth mentioning that if historians are correct, the

village of Kuna was found within the mountainous

territory of Songhai, the same region that at the time was

controlled by the lord of the mountains, Askiya Muhammed.

Perhaps after himself being sentenced to death by Sunni Ali multiple

times, Askiya Muhammed finally did what his opponent didn't have the

courage to do; that is, give the order to end his life.

In my view, another piece of evidence for this is a single line

in the Tarikh al-fataash. It's mentioned quite incidentally

that Ali's soldiers buried him before anyone else had even learned of his

death. If this is true, it may be that he had

wounds on his body that they wanted to conceal.

Ali was succeeded by his son Baru. It's not known whether he tried to

continue the repressive policies of his father.

Either way, half the country, sick of Sunni Ali's rule,

burst out in open revolt. Some noble families who had fled

Timbuktu during Sunni Ali's time on the throne

marched back home with their armies, and the man they rallied around was the

one who had headed the opposition against the tyrant,

Askiya Muhammed.

The speed this all happened at makes many historians believe that this was a

plot that had been in place for a long time,

perhaps for years. Perhaps suspecting the nature of this plot,

Sunni Ali's son Baru was determined to stamp out this upstart General

Muhammed. Sunni

Baru's armies massed around him, as is dramatically rendered in the Tarikh

al-fataash. His troops surrounded him like a

mountain range. They raised storms of dust that turned

day into night, and they were mirrored by their great

cries. All swore of our blood would run in

torrents. Askiya

Muhammed also gathered his rebel forces and marched on the capital city of Gao.

Sunni Baru marched out and met him on the battlefield

at a place called Anfao. His army outnumbered Askiya Muhammed’s,

but Baru must have been nervous as the army of this experienced general

gathered outside of his city. He must have tried to remember the

lessons his father had taught him.

First, the two armies would have exchanged a volley of arrows,

their cavalries harassing and harrying each other's lines,

as well as skirmishing among themselves before the spearmen

finally drew in together to fight. When the two armies met, the experience

of Askiya Muhammed won over the greater numbers of Sunni

Baru. One of Baru's generals, when he saw which

way the battle was going, threw himself into the River Niger and

drowned. From this moment on, the Askiya Muhammed

would rule the 24 tribes of the Songhai.

The death of the tyrannical King Sunni Ali

in November 1492 came at a historical tipping point of immense

importance. Around the world at this time, big things

were underway. The Catholic monarchs of Spain had

enacted a new law banishing all of Spain's Jews.

As many as 200,000 Spanish Jews were forced to flee,

and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire sent his grand fleet

to escort them safely to relocate in his lands.

One month before, England's Henry VII had laid siege to the French port of

Boulogne, forcing the French king to sue for peace.

On the other side of the world, in the islands of the Caribbean, only

days before Sunni Ali was swept away in that flash flood,

a European explorer named Christopher Columbus

first set foot on the new world.

The battle of Anfao in 1493, when Askiya Muhammed emerged victorious

outside the walls of Gao, came just a few months before Columbus

set out on his second voyage. For the history of the African

continent, this discovery would begin one of its bleakest chapters.

It's not recorded whether news of these developments reached the new king

of Songhai, Askiya Muhammed, but he had quite enough

to be occupying him at home. Muhammed had inherited a Songhai

territory that had never been larger. By the time he came to the throne,

imperial Songhai comprised a broad diversity of ethnic

groups including the Fulbe, Soninke, Tuareg,

Dogon, Bambara, and Bozo, but it had also suffered greatly

from decades of civil war and attacks by its aggressive neighbours.

Muhammed immediately set about trying to fix these problems.

In response to ongoing attacks from outside,

he became determined to reform the Songhai army

and secure the empire's borders. He expanded

its powerful cavalry and moved away from the use of slave soldiers and conscripts

to become a true professional standing army.

Soon after seizing power, he embarked on a series of campaigns that would have

impressed even the ferocious Sunni Ali.

He announced a legally sanctioned jihad against the Mossi people to the south.

He marched on their cities, capturing many of them, and expanding the empire

further. Then he marched against the desert

Tuareg people and seized the salt mines of Taghaza,

a land where the salt was so numerous that people built their houses

out of salt bricks. Askiya Muhammed spread the boundaries of the

Songhai Empire until it was the largest territory that

Africa had ever seen. But while he shared something of his

predecessor's military skill, in many ways Askiya Muhammed seems to have been

the polar opposite of Sunni Ali. Whereas

Ali had only been a conqueror, Muhammed was a diplomat and an administrator.

He sought to reconcile the differences of the people in his empire,

and the chronicle Tarikh al-Sudan speaks especially highly of him.

Through Askiya Muhammed, God the Most High alleviated the Muslim's distress

and eased their tribulation. He strove to establish the community of Islam

and improve people's lot. He befriended the scholars

and sought counsel from them over the appointments and dismissals he made.

It should be remembered that these chronicles are essentially pieces of

propaganda for Muhammed Askiya’s dynasty, but we do

see this character in evidence in our other sources too.

Muhammed's friendship with scholars is perhaps the thing that so distinctly

sets him apart from his predecessor. He made peace with the persecuted

scribes and learned men of Timbuktu, bringing banished families back from

exile, and even maintaining personal

friendships with some scribes. Askiya Muhammed was also pluralistic and

outward looking. While the chronicles don't mention Sunni

Ali doing a single thing outside of the empire's borders, Askiya

Muhammed brought in a new age of diplomacy.

He forged connections that reached right across the Muslim world. He even made

a pilgrimage to Mecca in imitation of that legendary king of

Mali, Mansa Musa. Perhaps most crucially, in a symbolic

act, he invited a leader from each of his

empire's ethnic groups to join him on his pilgrimage. Even

ethnic groups like the Fulbe, which had been persecuted and massacred

under Sunni Ali, were invited along. This,

more than anything, was the true source of Askiya Muhammed's success.

In the new Songhai Empire, he began to forge a state that crossed ethnic

boundaries.

The empires that had come before were only ever just that --

empires. In the Ghana Empire, the Soninke people had conquered their

neighbors and ruled over them. In the Mali Empire, it was the Mande

people who did the same. But in Songhai, a new kind of political

project was being formed. It was a nation that incorporated all

the different peoples that lived within its borders,

and which inspired loyalty in its people that rose above their original loyalties

to their tribe. It was a very modern kind of state.

Muhammed also succeeded in doing what few Songhai kings had achieved

before; that is, to unite the two sides of the

empire, its heart in Gao and its brain in

Timbuktu. Muhammed managed to bring the Muslims of

Timbuktu over to his side, but he never truly renounced the ancient

magic of his ancestors. So, he fused together an empire that

looked like it might truly last the test of time.

During Muhammed's reign, he established standardized trade measures and

regulations, and began policing trade routes to keep

them safe, as well as establishing an organized tax

system. He divided the empire into states and

appointed a governor of each one. He also appointed ministers who took

care of finance, justice, agriculture, and other areas of

government. All these developments ushered in an

age of virtually unprecedented peace and prosperity in

the region. But this golden age, like all golden ages,

was soon to come to an end.

Towards the end of his life, Askiya Muhammed became blind.

According to West African law, this would have disqualified him from ruling,

since the king was expected to lead his army into battle. But

Askiya Muhammed seems to have been reluctant to give the crown to any one

of his sons. As his sight increasingly failed and he

reached the age of seventy, he began to heavily rely on his powerful

royal vizier to enact policies for him.

Rumors began to spread that this vizier had undue influence over the old king.

Askiya Muhammed also had 37 sons, and as the king got older, each of these

began to grow impatient for him to pass on the crown

to one of them. Eventually, one of these sons, a man named

Musa, grew tired of waiting.

Musa is remembered in the chronicles as an impudent and stupid boy,

spoiled by a life of royal luxury. He moved to seize his father's crown,

deposing Askiya Muhammed, and banishing the blind old man

to an island in the middle of the Niger River,

which the chronicles describe as a place infested with mosquitoes and toads.

Musa's seizure of the throne naturally enraged Askiya Muhammed's other sons,

many of whom probably thought they had a better claim.

The empire soon erupted in civil war. Musa would go on to kill several of his

brothers and nearly 30 of his cousins, some in

battle, and others in assassinations and executions.

But eventually, he himself was overcome in the year 1531,

just two years after taking power. The Songhai Empire, like Ghana and Mali

before it, had few clear laws of succession.

While the Askiya Muhammed made many legal reforms during his reign,

this seems to have been something that no one had mustered the political will

to change. A period of bitter usurpings and civil wars

followed, but there was one ray of light to come

out of all the chaos. About eight years after the toppling and

banishment of Askiya Muhammed, one of his other sons, a man named

Askiya Ismail, managed to seize the throne. He ordered

for his blind father to be released from the mosquito-infested island

where he had been imprisoned, and so, the old king returned to his home to die

one year later. But what the spoiled prince Musa had unleashed

couldn't be contained. Askiya Ismail soon died in unknown circumstances,

and the chaos of disputed succession rolled on.

The next 20 years saw almost constant bloodshed,

as various claimants to the throne of the Askiyas

fought and died. Whole generations of young men

were piled into this meat grinder, all to satisfy the vanity of princes.

Askiya Muhammed had turned the Songhai Empire into one of the world's great

powers, and as so often happens when a great

society is built, men would now risk everything to take it

for themselves.

The chronicle Tarikh al-fataash doesn't mince words

when it comes to the question of what led to Songhai's growing weakness.

What caused the ruin of the state of Songhai and compelled God to throw it

into disorder? What brought divine punishment down upon

its citizens? It was their failure to observe the laws

of God. The injustice of slavery. The most grave

crimes and most disagreeable acts were committed there,

as well as the pride and arrogance of the great ones.

We all belong to God. It is to him that we should return.

As civil wars raged, the country's wealth began to run dry.

Wars caused disruption at the lucrative trade hubs of Jenne,

Timbuktu, and Gao, damaging the land's income.

West African armies also lived and died by their supply of horses,

and each rival warring prince needed a steady supply

to replenish his army. These horses were usually imported across the desert from

Europe at great expense, but with all the

disruption and chaos, increasingly only one resource remained

in abundance in West Africa that could be traded for the horses

needed in these wars, and that resource was its people.

During these times of crisis, the slave trade increased in volume.

Defeated armies in these civil wars were frequently captured and sold,

and thousands were shipped across the desert to be sold as

labourers in Europe and Arabia. This was a crucial moment for the

history of this continent. The failure of political stability in

its largest empire, coupled with an increase in slave-taking

to pay for these constant wars, coincided in tragic form with the first

European trading posts that were set up by the

Portuguese at Sao Tomé and Sao Salvadore,

as well as fortified positions all up the coast of Morocco.

This was the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade

that would dwarf the Saharan slave trade both in its size

and its cruelty.

Within twenty years of Askiya Muhammed's death,

barely 50 years after the discovery of the Americas,

as many as 250,000 Africans had already been kidnapped and

transported to the new world.

By the time the slave trade was abolished in the 19th century,

the number would exceed 12 million, and of these,

nearly two million died on the voyage. The period of bloodletting did come to

an end in the Empire of Songhai with the reign of a man named Askiya Dawud.

He, at least, seems to have been a shrewd operator,

and immediately placed his sons in strategic positions in the government.

His ability to stabilize the nation would lead to a brief return

to its former flourishing state. For this reason, he is often referred to

as Songhai's second-greatest king, after the great Askiya Muhammed.

But when Askiya Dawud came to power, he inherited

a weakened and damaged country. It's clear that during the 20 years of

unrest and civil strife following the death of Askiya Muhammed,

rebel factions across the country had gained power and confidence.

Askiya Dawud undertook a number of campaigns to stamp down insurgencies

across the country, and he sent his cavalry up into the

mountains to put a stop to bandit rage there,

with some success. But if he had any hopes of expanding his borders further

like his predecessors, that would have been put a stop to by a

failed campaign against the Mossi people that killed a

large number of his commanders.

Dawud even embarked on several public works,

instituting the equivalent of public libraries in the kingdom.

But all of this came at a cost.

During his long 34-year reign, slavery greatly increased in the empire.

Songhai's agriculture suffered from wars as well as droughts and famines, and in

response, it seems that the former citizen farming

was replaced with slave plantations.

While slavery had always been a feature of Songhai society,

during Askiya Dawud's reign, the empire became a true

slave state. This would have caused social disruption across the land, as

whole communities were harrowed by slave raids,

and this would have in turn fueled political disruption.

There are even stories of royal slaves attaining great power and wealth in

Songhai, even going on to command significant

influence in the capital after the deaths of their masters.

But towards the end of Askiya Dawud's life, things began to get worse.

In the year 1582, a great plague killed many in Timbuktu, and syphilis,

brought back from the new world by Europeans,

appears to have also ravaged the population.

With the final death of Askiya Dawud one year later

in 1583, Songhai once again spiraled into civil war and chaos.

The kings that followed each ruled for only a few years

before being killed or deposed. At the same time, drought descended on

the region, followed by famine and inflation.

A strong Songhai state at the height of its power

might have been able to ride out these challenges, but with rival princes

fighting over the throne, there was no energy available to help

Songhai's people, and its now largely slave-based

agriculture began to collapse. Songhai

entered the final stages of the imperial society

and after this point, there was no turning back.

The final king of Songhai was a man named Askiya Ishaaq II.

Little is known about this character, and what we do know

isn't good. He seems to have been a relatively competent ruler, but he was

also vengeful and merciless. He seems to have channeled

the energy of Sunni Ali far more than Askiya Muhammed. The

chronicles remember Askiya Ishaaq burying some of

his enemies alive, wrapped in palm frond sacks, and he had

one lord beaten to death with a knotted belt. This was also

the king who would preside over the final,

dramatic collapse of the entire Songhai Empire.

This unrest in Songhai came at an unfortunate time;

that's because it coincided with the growing power of a rising star in the

region, the Kingdom of Morocco.

Situated on the north African coast, right across the Mediterranean Sea from

Spain and Portugal, Morocco had been growing in strength and

confidence for many years.

A new dynasty known as the Saadi had seized

control of the country in 1549, and they gained huge popular support by

expelling the Portuguese from the forts and trading posts they'd

established along the Moroccan coast. In retaliation, Portugal invaded Morocco,

and it was so confident in victory that it sent its king

and virtually the entire Portuguese nobility on the campaign.

They met the Moroccan sultan's army at the battle

of Ksar el Kebir. The Portuguese, believing themselves inherently superior

to the Arab Moroccans, were overconfident in battle. They

allowed themselves to be surrounded, enveloped, and utterly defeated.

Eight thousand Portuguese soldiers were killed, and

fifteen thousand captured. The body of the Portuguese King Sebastian

was never recovered, and virtually his entire court was eradicated in one blow.

Portugal was virtually beheaded in a single day,

and this resulted in a succession crisis of their own

that led to them becoming part of a union with Spain for the next 60 years.

The Moroccans were understandably ecstatic.

They had decisively defeated their greatest rival,

but the victory had all but emptied their treasury,

and with their confidence at an all-time high, the Moroccans began to turn their

gaze southwards to the rich but troubled lands that lay

across the great Sahara Desert; the lands of salt and gold. The lands

of the Songhai.

One of the prizes that the Moroccans most coveted

was the salt mines of Taghaza, that rich salt pan

where people literally built their houses out of salt.

But they also believed the European rumors

that a great gold mine must lie somewhere in Africa,

and they desired this mine for themselves.

It's clear that by this time, news of the internal divisions in Songhai

had reached beyond its borders. One chronicle even names an escaped

royal slave who is supposed to have fled to

Marrakesh and delivered a message to the Moroccan king…informing him of

the weakness of Songhai's leadership, and providing intelligence about them

concerning their desperate circumstances, their depraved natures, and their

enfeebled power, he urged the king to take the land.

So, Morocco seized its chance. They prepared an invasion force.

This invasion was actually led by a Spaniard,

a man named Judar Pasha. Judar had piercing blue eyes.

He was born as Diego de Guevara, but was captured by Moroccan slave

raiders as a boy and brought up in the service of the

Moroccan sultan. From there, he rose through the ranks of

Moroccan society and proved himself a shrewd military

commander. But he had no small task ahead of him.

To invade Songhai, he and his men would have to cross the great Sahara Desert

with all their equipment, and the impoverished Moroccan sultan

had given him scarcely any resources at all.

In fact, the force they mustered to undertake the invasion of Africa's

greatest empire was tiny. Judar had barely more than four

thousand men, including just 500 light cavalry.

They knew that if reports were correct, an army of tens of thousands

guarded the borders of Songhai. But they had a secret weapon that would

tip the scales dramatically in their favor, something

that in all their years of civil war, the kings of Songhai

had neglected. That thing was gunpowder.

Since its development in China in the 9th century,

gunpowder had become an increasingly important feature on European

battlefields. The first cannons began as siege weapons

used to knock down castle walls, but as the technology became more

refined, they soon became used as a battlefield weapon,

too. Hand-held guns began as defensive weapons in Germany in

the early 1400s. They were mounted on city walls and used

to fire pellets of lead or stone down onto attacking forces.

But by 1450, they had become handheld weapons.

Around 1475, the matchlock mechanism was added to firearms. It was the first

mechanical firing device, meaning that guns

no longer needed to be fired by lighting a fuse with a match.

These were the first guns with triggers, and they transformed the way battles

were fought. Around 1520, towards the end of Askiya

Muhammed's reign, the first muskets were developed, named

after the French word mousqette, or sparrowhawk. This was a firearm

capable of piercing heavy armor, and it ended the age of the armored

soldier on European battlefields. Although the Spaniard Judar marched with

only four thousand men, of these, the majority were

musketeers. Many of them were mercenaries from Spain.

He also brought with him a total of eight English cannons.

Judar’s expedition left Marrakesh in November, 1590,

taking advantage of the slightly cooler winter temperatures to cross the desert.

But still, it was slow and arduous going.

The troops lugged their heavy equipment, their eight

cannons, and all their armor and supplies. As was common for desert crossings, many

must have died along the way. It took them nearly four months, twice

the normal journey time. But in February, they finally arrived on

the banks of the Niger River, dusty and beleaguered, and only enough of

them to fill a large theater. From there,

they marched on the Songhai capital of Gao.

It took them another month to cross the silty floodplain

of the Niger. The ground would have been swampy

and infested with mosquitoes. Many would have contracted malaria

or the dreaded sleeping sickness. But soon,

the city walls of Gao came into view in the distance,

that red sand dune on the horizon turning pink

at sunrise. In the cattle pastures outside the city,

at a place called Tondibi, they also saw the vast army

of the Songhai Empire marching out in all its glory to meet them.

The sight must have been incredible. Estimates vary, but the force gathered by

the Songhai King Askiya Ishaaq likely topped over forty

thousand men. Some sources put it at as many as eighty thousand,

enough to fill a large modern sports stadium.

If you've ever been to a stadium during a big game,

you can probably imagine the sound that this army would have made.

The ground would have shaken with the force of their footfalls

and the hooves of their tens of thousands of horses.

They would have been accompanied by a substantial troop of drummers and other

musicians, thousands of archers, and tens of

thousands of spears clattering overhead as they marched.

In contrast, the Moroccan army must have looked

tiny, thin, and scattered. But they lined up along the low rise of

a hill and readied their muskets to fire.

Despite their enormous strength in numbers, the Songhai military tactics

didn't get off to a great start. They had heard rumors about the wonder

weapons that the Moroccans had brought with them,

and they had come up with a plan to neutralize them.

But the age of the great tacticians Sunni Ali and Askiya Muhammed

were gone.

The beginning of the Songhai plan was to send a stampede of a thousand cattle

towards the Moroccan lines. They hoped this would soak up

some of the Moroccan musket fire and that it might even panic the foreigners

into retreating. Then the enormous force of Songhai heavy

cavalry could mow them down as they fled.

But this tactic didn't quite go as planned.

The cattle stampede began, but as they bore down on the enemy lines,

the Moroccan soldiers let off a volley of cannon fire,

as recalled in the chronicle Tarikh al-fataash.

When the cattle heard the sound of the rifles,

they became frantic. They stampeded back towards the soldiers of the Askiya,

crashing a great number between them, the majority of whom

died. Despite this setback, the Songhai infantry advanced, but they

didn't fare much better than the cattle. From the high ground in the distance,

Moroccan muskets let off puffs of smoke. Before the distant cracks

of the weapons could even be heard, the pellets of lead would have struck;

whizzing through the air, passing right through armor and flesh,

mowing hundreds down in a single volley. It would have been truly terrifying, as

the chronicle recalls.

The dust and smoke engulfed the throng of combatants,

and God sowed fear and dread into the ranks of the Songhai army.

It's at this point that the Songhai King Ishaaq

seems to have begun to panic. He ordered his cavalry to charge in

against the line of musketeers, desperate for some of his soldiers to

even reach them, but the cavalry charge would be

hopelessly doomed. Their thick breastplates would have been

effortlessly punctured by the whizzing musket balls, and their

horses, unused to this new strange threat, panicked

and fled the battle. The Songhai archers were mowed down before they could come

into range, and soon these, too, fled the battle.

Only the Songhai rearguard remained. These were the elite royal bodyguards of

the king. Perhaps beginning to feel a little sorry

for their enemies, or beginning to suspect this massacre

was not the most honorable thing, the Moroccans finally advanced, drawing

swords and pole arms for close combat. The elite royal

bodyguards of the king, enveloped on all sides, stayed and fought

to the last man. One Spanish source even records that

they bent their knees to the ground and tied them into position with their

belts so that they could maintain their spear line

even as the strength of their muscles failed.

But it, too, was a doomed effort.

The Songhai force was utterly crushed. Its king fled along with the rest of its

soldiers, and Judar Pasha's men descended on the

helpless city of Gao. They sacked it, looted its treasures, and

burned its buildings before moving on to the richer trading

centers of Timbuktu and Jenne, where they looted and burned

in a similar fashion. The chronicles recall the devastation

caused with deep sorrow.

It is beyond our powers to fully describe all the misery and losses that

were suffered at Timbuktu, when the Moroccans took the town. The

Moroccans even tore off the doors of the houses

and cut down the town's trees.

Horrified by the defeat, the Songhai generals

deposed their useless king Askiya Ishaaq, and the central power of the state

collapsed. Morocco attempted to occupy the Songhai

lands and build an empire of their own in West

Africa, but the challenges of maintaining such

an empire across the obstacle of the Sahara

proved too much. Still, they looted everything they could from Songhai,

carrying everything they could transport back across the desert.

When they faced resistance in Timbuktu, the Moroccans

even sent leading scholars to Marrakesh in chains

and kept them there as hostages. The wealth of Timbuktu,

Gao, and Jenne was systematically stripped.

When the Spaniard Judar Pasha returned to Morocco in 1599,

victorious nine years after setting out across the desert with his army,

his caravan included 30 camel loads of gold

as payment for his services.

The fall of imperial Songhai happened completely

and all at once.

Its complete dissolution came only eight years

after the death of what is remembered as its second greatest king,

Askiya Dawud. It burst like a bubble from a single puncture.

The defeat at the battle of Tondibi sent splinters running right across the

empire, just as it happened to Ghana and Mali.

Soon, where a single state had existed, now countless small kingdoms reasserted

their freedoms and separate borders.

Western Africa cracked like an egg; kingdoms splintered into smaller

kingdoms, which themselves splintered into even smaller kingdoms.

Now, there could be no unified resistance to the spreading

influence of European colonialism. As the splintering states warred amongst

themselves, they would frequently sell their

captured enemies into slavery, boosting the slave economy to untold

heights. Predatory Europeans set up trading posts

all along the African coast, profiting from the chaos, and the full

horror of the transatlantic slave trade began.

As the manpower of Africa was drained on an industrial scale,

its hopes of ever rebuilding the glory of Ghana,

Mali, and Songhai would be frustrated. In the years that followed, the economy

of Timbuktu declined and with it, its position as a center of

learning. The destruction of the city was so

profound that the author of one of the chronicles,

a man named Al-Sa’di, wrote this lament at the beginning of his work.

I have witnessed the ruin of learning and its utter collapse.

His sorrow at the destruction that he witnessed during his life

is what inspired him to write his masterpiece.

He writes that he hopes his chronicle will inspire future generations

to remember these days of greatness. Because learning is rich in beauty and

fertile in its teaching, since it instructs men about their

fatherland, their ancestors, their history, the names of their heroes, and what lives

they lived, I asked God's help and decided to set

down all that I myself could learn on the subject of the

Songhai princes; their adventures, their story, their

achievements, and their wars.

As wars between splinter states raged on across the region,

Timbuktu was repeatedly besieged and captured.

Many of the city's great scholars were kidnapped and sold as slaves during this

time. They were shipped to the coast and

transported across the Atlantic to the new world.

As the city declined, its libraries gathered dust.

Over the centuries, its manuscripts became precious heirlooms,

and the city's noble families hid away their cherished books in private

collections, often protecting them at great personal

risk against raiders and invading armies. The dry desert air and these dedicated

caretakers preserved their pages perfectly, and it's

thanks to the efforts of these families of book lovers

that the two great Timbuktu chronicles, which made up so much of this episode's

story, have survived.

The great capital city of Gao slowly faded

and shrunk into obscurity. As its population left, sycamore trees

and silk cottons put down roots into the cracks in its walls.

Its great mosque began to crumble beneath the forces of the weather,

and its eastern tower collapsed. Soon, only about 300 families would live

here, surrounded by the ruins of the city's

former glory, now overgrown with thorns and bushes.

No more would be heard of Gao on the world stage

until the German explorer Heinrich Barth stumbled upon its ruins

in the 19th century. But the imperial cycle went on and on.

The fractured states of West Africa would eventually be folded into the sea-

-going empires of European nations: the French, British, and Portuguese who

extracted their resources and grew rich on them. That is,

until the cycle turned on, when these subjugated client states

demanded their independence, and the European empires

fell apart in the 1950s and 60s. If there's one thing you should have

learned over the course of this podcast, it's that history is change and nothing

lasts forever.

I want to end this episode with a couple of short passages

from one of the documents that has informed so much of the history of this

region, the Timbuktu chronicle the Tarikh

al-fataash, the chronicle of the seeker.

This document is a remarkable piece of literature.

It represents the unifying of the two great traditions of the Songhai.

It's a perfect marriage of the scholarly Islamic traditions of Timbuktu,

with the ancient beliefs of the griots and sorcerers of West Africa,

and the result is a work of startling poetic value. It's a book of history,

but it's also an epic piece of poetry including dream visions,

prophecies, and conversations with spirits

that make it in my view, one of the great pieces of world literature.

One incredible passage recounts the great King Askiya

Muhammed speaking to a wise man. This man teaches the king to speak to

spirits, and they tell him about his nation's

past, but also crucially, its future. They give him a remarkably

accurate account of what fate will befall his country.

Unless you're inclined to believe in prophecies, of course,

it's likely that this was written after these events,

and therefore, forms a kind of lament about the direction that the empire went,

an elegy to a lost golden age. As you listen, I'd like you to think

about how it must have felt to watch this complex and sophisticated

society slide into chaos, as the doors

of the great libraries of Timbuktu closed,

and the books began to gather dust on their shelves.

Imagine what it must have felt like to watch the trees begin to grow

in the walls of the great mosques of Gao and Jenne,

their mud walls crumbling, their towers collapsing.

Imagine watching the population leave one by one,

and the houses empty, the booming markets go steadily quiet, and the sounds of

prayer in the mosque go silent, as the rolling sand dunes

begin to burst through the doors, rolling over hills and houses,

while all the while, the songs of the griots

still sounded somewhere in the gathering dusk.

The prince asked the wise man: tell me, is it possible for men to see the

spirits and speak with them? Yes, it is entirely possible, the wise man

replied. If we were alone, we could speak with

them right now. The prince ordered all those who are

present to go away and leave them alone so that only the prince and the wise man

remained. They stayed in seclusion for a long time,

and then the king spoke.

I see the earth's surface transformed into a lake of water.

He said, I see the stars surging out of the water

and flying towards the heavens. The birds swoop down around me

and they cut each other to pieces. Next, I see seven men

carrying a green throne which they place between the two of us.

So, we sit for a while only to see a great number of men appear before us,

some holding books, and others holding writing tablets.

In their midst, I see an old man who leans upon a staff.

I don't know where any of these people come from. They sit down and stare at us.

The old man approaches the throne and takes his seat. The old man

spoke a prophecy. As a ruler, he said, you will be quite happy, tolerant,

and generous. At the end of your life, you will go blind. You will have many

sons, but when you are gone, they will no

longer walk the straight path. They will bring devastation to your

kingdom. These words saddened the prince who

remained silent for a long moment. Then he let out a profound sigh like the

moaning of a father who has just lost his son.

Thank you once again for listening to The Fall of Civilizations Podcast.

I'd like to thank my voice actors for this episode, Rhy Brignell,

Jake Barrett Mills, Bryan Tshiobi, and Pip Willett.

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