ASKIA MOHAMED HAD been part of the governing Songhai elite. He seems to have been a Soninke, from either the Sylla (Silla, Silla) clan or the Thure clan. His mother was either the daughter of a chief of Kura, a large island in the Niger, or was called Kasay and was a sister of Sonni Ali Ber, as the oral traditions would prefer. He grew up in Gao, in the Songhai court itself, with all the privileges that would imply. Whatever the truth of his origins, all sources agree that he was a friend of Islam, a man of substantial piety himself, respectful of religion and learning, from the point of view of Timbuktu's ulema an ideal sovereign for a Muslim people. Ahmed Baba, writing more than a hundred years later, gives the approved Timbuktu version: "God made use of his service in order to save the true believers from their sufferings and calamities."1
Certainly, Timbuktu claimed him as their own. Still, it's probable that this approving tone was an after-the-fact adoption by the Timbuktu elite; considerable evidence suggests that the first askia paid rather smaller attention to Timbuktu than the chroniclers of that city would have posterity believe, at least at first.2
His accession to power was not a given. He easily mastered the western provinces of Djenne, Timbuktu, Tindirma, Masina and Hombori, all of which were much more Islamic than the eastern part of the empire, consisting of Gao itself, Kukiya, Gurma and the Dendi plains south of the river.3 His brother was governor of Tindirma, so that part was easy. Masina quickly came on board, and of course Timbuktu could hardly wait to get rid of Sonni Baru. But Baru still had formidable forces under his control. Gao itself and the Dendi region had always been strongly animist and nativist, and still regarded Islam as Sonni Ali had, as something imposed on them by foreigners. The Islamic leaders in Gao had come to an accommodation of sorts with the Sonnis, tolerating deviations that dismayed the more orthodox.
The first battle was fought at a place called Danagha, on February 18, 1493. The rebels attacked first, and their assault lasted the whole day and into the next. Both sides suffered massive losses, but in the end Baru prevailed and pushed the rebels back.
It's at this point that the received story, as recounted in the two Tarikhs, departs rather sharply from what seem to be the facts.
The "official" Timbuktu story is more or less this: the first battle against Baru was not a rout; the rebel forces at least prevented the emperor from counterattacking either Tindirma or Timbuktu, and both the chronicles emphasize that the "Islamic forces" were not discouraged—the mosques were filled to overflowing, and the prayers to God must have been deafening. In this way the ulema—and the chronicles—position the conflict as an explicitly religious one, a question of Islam and civilization versus animism and barbarity, rather than the more tawdry rising of a general against his legitimate sovereign.
To give his army time to regroup, the story goes, the rebel commander recruited three of the most illustrious of Timbuktu's notables, including the eminent Mohamed Kati, to petition the emperor to embrace Islam and so end the conflict. If true, this would have had the effect of turning his subsequent assault from a mere rebellion into a jihad, a righteous response to wrongdoing. But there is considerable doubt these embassies ever happened.
Still, the story has it that the emissaries met the expected response: the emperor categorically refused to discuss anything at all. And so the second battle took place not far from Gao, on April 2, 1492. This time the rebels triumphed, overrunning the enemy and leaving great slaughter in their wake. As the Tarikh al-Sudan puts it, "the combat was terrible, and each side suffered enormous losses."4Sonni Baru fled south to the Dendi and, like his father, vanished from history.
Mohamed Abu Bakr took the throne with the titles of emir of Mumenin and khalifa el Moslemin, and adopted askia as his royal title. The origin of the title is obscure, but the Tarikh offers this explanation: "When the news [of his victory] reached the daughters of Sonni Ali, they said, a si kia, which means in their language, he shall not be if, on hearing this he ordered that he be given no other name but that."5He would henceforth be known only as Askia Mohamed, or later, after his pilgrimage to the Holy Places, as Askia al-hajj Mohamed.
The notables of Timbuktu were triumphant, the Tarikhs say. "They had participated by their prayers and their encouragement at the fall of the Sonni dynasty. Through prayer and their sacrifices God had answered them." To outsiders, these "sacrifices" must have seemed elusive, even fictional, and even their participation in the triumph illusory. Still, their triumphant tone was real. It certainly suited them to claim the new ruler as one of theirs.
At first, when Askia Mohamed neglected Timbuktu, they understood. He did, after all, have a lot on his mind. The newly crowned king began to systematically extend his holdings beyond the Central Niger kingdom of Sonni Ali and his son, soon controlling, as Heinrich Barth put it, only exaggerating slightly, "from the centre of Hausa almost to the borders of the Atlantic, and from the pagan country of Mosi, as far as Tawat to the south of Morocco."6 To the east, his influence took in the Tuareg sultanate of Agadez and the Air Massif, which included the huge copper mines at Takedda. He also tried to assert his control over the Hausa city-states, especially Katsina and Kano, the principal mercantile cities, with mixed results: they seem to have paid him some tribute but never really submitted. To the west, he made colonies of the lands all the way to the Senegal River and thence to the Atlantic, conquering what had been the heartland of Old Ghana-Wagadu and Mali, from Mema to Niani, killing most of its leaders; and to the north he took control of the crucial Taghaza salt mines, leaving a local Tuareg chieftain in charge but co-opting him into the ruling class.
His overall objective was simple, if complicated in its execution: it was to control the north-south trade in gold and salt and slaves, the principal articles of wealth in the Sahel.
The southern boundary of his realm was still the Hombori district along the Bandiagara cliffs, with the fractious and quarrelsome Mossi to its south a problem that had yet to be dealt with. That was the first order of business.
To fulfill the conditions for a legitimate jihad, the askia needed first to formally solicit the Mossi's conversion to Islam, as he was supposed to have done with Sonni Baru, and sent them an emissary too, probably as fictional as the ones supposedly sent to Baru. The Tarikhs report that the Mossi chief, Nasiri, was hesitant. He had to consult his ancestors in the other world, he told the askia's messenger. "So he went to the idol-house with his ministers, and the emissary went with them to see how the dead were consulted. When they performed their customary rites there appeared before them an old man. Upon seeing him, they prostrated and told him what had happened. He spoke to them in their own tongue, saying, T am against your ever doing that. On the contrary, you should fight them to the last of your men and theirs.'
Nasiri then said to the emissary, 'Go back to the Askia and tell him there can be nothing between us but war and strife.' After people had left the house, the emissary said to the one who had appeared in the form of an old man, T ask you in the name of God Almighty, who are you?' He said, T am Iblis [the devil]. I lead them astray that they may die as unbelievers.'"7And so the jihad was waged and their country duly devastated, though without permanent result.
TO RUN HIS affairs, the askia governed through a cabinet of regional officials. The most important of these was the governor of Tindirma Province, called the Kurmina-fari, who was viceroy for the western provinces and governed the empire while the king was away. His brother, Omar Kumzaghu, was already installed in this post, and he was left in charge. The other important post was called the Dendi-fari, governor of the Dendi region, whose occupant wore special clothing and had the right to speak his mind to the askia; the first appointee was another brother, also called Omar, recalled from Walata, which he had governed for the Sonnis. (Appointing brothers to important posts was widely regarded as an eccentricity; it was the medieval custom, in Gao and all through Byzantium and the Arab world, for a new ruler to have his brothers strangled so they couldn't rise against him.) Other high officials in the cabinet included the governor of Dirma Province, who had the unique privilege of entering the askia's courtyard on horseback and who was, also uniquely, allowed to build a two-story house; the hugokokoi, who was a eunuch and ran the palace itself as a kind of general manager of palace affairs; and the Kabara-farma, who was the harbormaster and customs collector at the river port of Kabara. Other important though lesser officials were at places like Taghaza, and still others were in charge of boats and river traffic. The sultan of Djenne, with whom the Sonnis had made an accommodation, was still recalcitrant, and the askia hauled him to Gao and imprisoned him there until he died, installing his own man at Djenne as Djennekoi.
Timbuktu was conspicuously absent from the cabinet, which didn't go unnoticed. Like Djenne, the city was run by a Tombouctoukoi, a regional governor, but the real power in that assertive city was wielded by the imams and the ulema who congregated around the university at Sankore. It was becoming clear to them, at least, that Askia Mohamed did not pay them the attention they felt they deserved.
IN THE AFTERMATH of his military campaigns, Askia Mohamed made his pilgrimage to Mecca. Piecing together the event from Ahmed Baba's history and from the Tarikhs more fanciful version, Barth described the journey: " [The pilgrimage] brought him into contact with the princes and learned men of the East, and made him more famous than any other of his enterprises. The most distinguished men of all the tribes under his command accompanied him on his great journey . . . and 1,500 armed men, 800 of them cavalry. In passing by Egypt, he made the acquaintance of the great scholar es-Sayuti, who gave him advice on running his empire on Islamic principles. He took with him 300,000 mithqals but behaved so generously that he was obliged to contract a loan of 150,000 more."8
The Tarikh al-Fettach obligingly lists a number of the scholars who accompanied him, but the list, which seems to have been interpolated into the manuscript as late as the nineteenth century, is not to be trusted—at least one of the escorts wasn't even born at the time, and at least two others had already died.9The really interesting thing about the list goes unmentioned by the author of the Tarikh: that no one from Timbuktu made the journey. Either they boycotted it, or they weren't invited. Either way, it is more evidence against their centrality to the askia's power.
On the way to Mecca from Cairo, the party was said to have witnessed a miracle. "A hot wind blew on them and evaporated all their water. When they were nearly dead with heat and thirst, the Askia sent word to the Friend of God Most High who was among them, Salih Diawara, to intercede with God through his Prophet Mohammed, to provide them with something to drink. The holy one upbraided the messenger vigorously, saying that the Prophet was too exalted to be used for intercession in such a mundane matter. Then he prayed to God Most High, and He immediately sent them rain which came and satisfied their needs."10
In Mecca, the askia had an official investiture performed by Sharif al-Abbasi (the Abbasid prince Moulay El Abbas) as "the eleventh khalif of Tekrur"—Tekrur in this instance being Mecca shorthand for the whole empire, thus harking back to the fact that Tekrur had been the first organized state in the western Sudan to convert to Islam. The prince placed on the askia's head a green bonnet and a white turban, and in his hand a sword, saying, "Whoever removes these orders in this country, disobeys Almighty God and his Envoy." While he was there, the askia founded a charitable institution in Mecca "for the people of Tekrur."
"It is of no small interest to a person who endeavors to take a comprehensive view of the various races of mankind," an admiring Heinrich Barth wrote in his journals, "to observe how, during the time when the Portuguese, having . . . taken possession of the whole western coast of Africa . . . and founded their Indian empire, that at this same time a negro king in the interior of the continent not only extended his conquests . . . but also governed the subjected tribes with justice and equity, causing well-being and comfort to spring up every where within the borders of his extensive dominions, and introducing such of the institutions of Mohammedan civilization as he considered might be useful to his subjects."11
WHILE HE WAS in Mecca, Askia Mohamed apparently suggested to Prince Moulay El Abbas, who governed the Holy Places, that his empire would run even better with an adviser steeped in the lore and history of Islam, and petitioned him to send to Gao one of his sharifs, perhaps even his brother or a son, "to bring even more grace and benediction to the people of his country." Some evidence suggests that Timbuktu was more than slightly put out by this request, not having been consulted—and not being given the chance to put forward one of its own to fill the post. In any case, surely such a one would prefer Timbuktu to Gao?
Salem Ould Elhadj assembled a narrative on what followed, based mostly on legend and folktale and on references in the Tarikhs, sifting out most of the many dreams, tales of malevolent djinn, and minor miracles:
"More than 20 years later, in 1519, he sent the envoy Moulay Ahmed es-Saqli, son of his brother, to establish himself in the court of the prince of Songhai. This sharif was originally from Baghdad. That he would leave for Timbuktu he knew from a prophecy that came to him in a vision." By suggesting that Timbuktu and not Gao appeared in this prophecy, the Tarikhs neatly inserted their city into the capital's place, courtesy of a holy vision. "Soon afterwards, he left Baghdad for . . . Cairo, then to Alexandria." For the next few years the story has the holy one wandering all over North Africa, with stops in Benghazi, Tripoli, Ghadames, Tunis and Sus, among other places. "Then he went to Fez . . . to Tindouf, then to Arawan. In each town he was given a certain sum of money. As the sharif approached Timbuktu, the qadi of that city, Mahmoud ben Umar, saw the Prophet in a vision (May God give him benedictions and honor him). The Prophet said to him, today there will arrive among you one of my descendants, wearing green robes. He is mounted on a black camel and has a stigmata on his left eye. He will preside today over the prayers at the fete. You must install him in a place close to the water, close to a cemetery, to a grand mosque and to a market."
It happened as the prophecy had said. The sharif arrived, was taken in and given lodging. "Following this, the inhabitants of the city all walked to the place of prayer, and he presided over all the ceremonies of the day. That was in 1519."
A little later, the sharif ordered a monument to be built at the place where his camel had first left its tracks in town. "This monument came to be called Koulou Seko," Sidi Salem said. "It means, the Monument of the Circle. The people of Timbuktu thereafter used the monument to celebrate the Prophet."
Several versions of what happened next can be found in the histories. The blandest merely reports that Askia Mohamed was told of the sharif's arrival, went to Timbuktu to receive him and gave him gifts of various sorts: 100,000 dinars, 500 slaves and 100 camels. Afterward the sharif married, had three sons and passed his life peacefully in the city. Other versions say that Askia Mohamed couldn't bring himself to be separated from the sharif and lured him to Gao, offering him 1,700 slaves as incentive. A more common Timbuktu variant, another sign of fractiousness between the political power in Gao and religious rulers in Timbuktu, is that the askia kidnapped him and imprisoned him in the capital; what happened to es-Saqli after that is not known. The most plausible version, which fits the character of the askia best, is that es-Saqli was persuaded to go to Gao with the promise of rich rewards. From the people of Timbuktu's point of view, whether he stayed in the city, was lured to Gao or was kidnapped, they considered him one of theirs and remembered him fondly.
That is more than can be said for the prickly cleric who next caught the askia's ear, the zealot Mohamed el-Maghili, sometimes known as el-Baghdadi, or more formally, Mohamed bin Abd al-Karim el-Maghili, a native of Tlem-cen. He was a firebrand, an irascible imam and an incendiary preacher. He made a name for himself in Tuat as a zealot; indeed, his preaching led to a pogrom against the Jews of that region. But the austerity of his code, and the disruption to trade caused by his harassment of Jews, eventually turned the people against him, and he was forced to flee. He spent some time in Katsina and Kano, in Nigeria, and then ended up in Gao. Whether this was at his own initiative, having heard of the great askia, or whether the askia invited him in his continuing search for spiritual enlightenment, no one knows.
His primary advice to the askia was to be bold, and ruthless in policy: "Kingdoms are held by the sword, not by delay. Can fear be thrust back, except by causing fear?"
It was at Maghili's urging that the askia, normally so tolerant, briefly turned against the Jews. He also tried, briefly and unsuccessfully, to impose some fundamentalist discipline on the freewheeling Islamists of Timbuktu, trying to compel women to adopt the hijab, for instance, and setting up a posse of religious police charged with "exercising a constant vigilance, and to arrest and imprison any man found talking to a strange woman at night."
None of this went down well with the more worldly imams of Timbuktu. Then, when Maghili heard that his son had been killed by Jews in Tuat in revenge for the pogrom he had instituted, he apparently persuaded the askia to arrest all the Tuatis in Gao, Jews or not. When he attempted the same thing in Timbuktu, the qadi refused to acquiesce and forced the askia to back down.
It is not known when Maghili left Gao, though some stories suggest it was after his son was murdered. But as soon as he was gone, Askia Mohamed set about courting the religious leaders of Timbuktu; in the end, the departed firebrand had been more trouble than he was worth, and Askia Mohamed needed to repair relationships with his commercial capital. He was never going to actually live in Timbuktu, but it was already far and away the most important commercial center of his empire, and he badly needed to get the ruling classes of Timbuktu, especially the ulema, on his side. He therefore undertook to ostentatiously undo much that Sonni Ali Ber and his son had created, and equally ostentatiously abandoned the garments of zealotry he had donned during Maghili's tenure. He stopped harassing the remaining Jews and gave them back their confiscated property. The hijab, so scorned by the Tuareg and the notables of Timbuktu, was no longer to be obligatory for women. He liberated men and women who had been unjustly imprisoned. He put a stop to the deportation of scholars. Wealth that Sonni Ali had seized he returned. He took the advice of the city's savants to arrest those officials of the old regime who had been most oppressive, confiscating their goods, their apparently numberless concubines and even their children. He freed all those slaves unjustly enslaved.
In an inspired gesture, he even humbled himself to the qadi of Timbuktu, Sheikh Sidi Mahmoud ben Umar. He made sure to pay a formal visit to the qadi when he returned from his travels, and he never passed through the region without visiting the sheikh's residence at Sankore.
The Tarikh al-Fettach recounts a typical visit.
After resting [at his camp] for a while, the king mounts his horse to take him to the house of the qadi, who awaits him attended by his assistants, his auxiliaries and his servants. When the prince arrives, the qadi rises to meet him at the gate. He has prepared food and drink for his visitors, who, wishing to participate in divine favor, consume the repast after addressing numerous invocations to God. The king then proceeds to the grand mosque, where he is received by the venerable ulema of the city and the principal imams, who have preceded him there. In procession with the qadi and his assistants, he enters the grand mosque, where he receives the homage due to him. After which he returns to his camp outside the city to receive delegations of city notables. Not one night goes by in which he is not offered a splendid meal by the people of the city, who also present him with numerous gifts.12
The askia's brother, Omar Kumzaghu, governor of the province of Tindirma, also assisted Timbuktu when he could, for example, dispatching masons from Tindirma to help repair the mosque of Sidi Yahiya, damaged by rainfall.
Timbuktu's intellectuals could barely contain their delight at the transformation and clasped the newly moderate askia to their collective bosom. Never mind that he remained in his capital at Gao; he was (now) a godly man and left them pretty much alone, and that was enough.
You can pick the encomiums out of the Tarikh al-Fettach to see their delight: "It is not possible to enumerate all his virtues, his benevolence to his subjects, and his solicitude to the poor"; "It is not possible to find his like, not among those who preceded him or those who came after"; "He had a living affection for the ulema, and holy persons"; "This was a man of great intelligence and wisdom"; "He banished all those Sonni Ali Ber introduced to reprehensible iniquities and bloody savagery"; "He established religion on a solid basis, he re-installed the imams and qadis." Alpha Kati of Timbuktu even attributed to him several miracles and said his entourage was always made up of people of culture and religion.13
For his part, the emperor was a touch more cynical, once complaining that no two of the ulema ever agreed with each other on a single point; they were, he once told Mahmoud Kati, like little tributaries that never quite succeeded in joining to make a river.
ONCE HIS EMPIRE was secure and his relationship with Timbuktu more cordial, the new hajj did something truly unusual: he disbanded a large part of his army and released many of his subjects from their onerous, expensive and time-consuming obligations to provide military levies. Barth, who is quoting a history of Songhai written by Ahmed Baba, puts it this way: "The first thing which this great Songhai king felt it incumbent to do was to give his subjects some repose by reducing his army and allowing some part of the people to engage in pacific pursuits, all the inhabitants having been employed by Sonni Ali in warlike purposes."14It had the desired effect: the newly liberated energy was indeed channeled into pacific pursuits that included trade and learning, and Timbuktu, especially, flowered once more.
As Sidi Salem puts it in an informal history of Timbuktu: "Strangers flocked into town from up and down the river and from the desert to do business in the town. In the markets, one could find all the plenty of the Maghreb and the Sahara, as well of goods from the Middle East, the Southern Sudan and the West African coast. Many Sudanese, Wangara and Songhai from Gao came to live in the city. With this influx of foreigners, the city grew enormously to the north and the south. In the period, Timbuktu was certainly the most populous city in West Africa."
Gao was still the political capital, the source of the empire's power and its military muscle. But Timbuktu was where business was done. The city's commercial flowering was fertilized by a trio of commodities: salt, gold and slaves. Other goods were traded too, of course. Copper paid plenty of taxes, luxury goods made their way to the south in return for leather, kola nuts and other southern produce, and esoterica such as civet (a substance extracted from the anal glands of civet cats and used as a basis for perfume) going north and books coming south paid many a wage. But in general those three, "white gold, yellow gold and black gold," represented the basis of all trans-Saharan trade. The demand for salt made the flowering possible; gold financed it; slaves made it work. Slaves were both the workforce and a luxury good in themselves.