Sonni Ali

Sonni Ali turned Songhai from a kingdom on a stretch of the Niger into the largest empire West Africa had known, and Muslim chroniclers have never forgiven him for how he treated their class. He came to the throne about 1464 and spent nearly thirty years campaigning, using a river fleet on the Niger together with cavalry, which let him move faster than any of his opponents. He took Timbuktu from the Tuareg in 1468 and Jenne after a long blockade in 1473, and with them the trans-Saharan trade in gold and salt. The Timbuktu chroniclers - the Tarikh al-Sudan and the Tarikh al-Fattash, written a century later by the scholarly families concerned - describe him as a tyrant who massacred the ulama, and he did persecute them, partly because Timbuktu's scholars had invited the Tuareg. He was a Muslim who also kept traditional Songhai religious practice, which the chroniclers treated as apostasy and which was probably ordinary for a ruler whose subjects were mostly not Muslim. He drowned crossing a river in 1492. His son was deposed within a year by Askia Muhammad, who was pious, and under whom the scholars wrote the history. His name in the oral tradition of the Songhai themselves is quite different from the one in the chronicles - a great magician and a founder rather than a persecutor - and the two accounts have never been reconciled because they come from the two constituencies he treated differently. Askia Muhammad went on pilgrimage, endowed the scholars and was made caliph of the Sudan, and the empire he inherited was the one Sonni Ali had built. Songhai at his death ran roughly fifteen hundred miles along the Niger, which is larger than any West African state before or since.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history