The Moroccan invasion and the fall of Songhai (1591)

Part oneA sultan who wanted the gold

In 1578 Ahmad al-Mansur became sultan of Morocco after a great victory over the Portuguese. He was rich, ambitious and well informed, and he looked south. Songhai controlled the gold that crossed the Sahara and the salt mines of Taghaza, which Morocco had long disputed with it. Al-Mansur demanded the revenue of the mines. The askia refused.

Al-Mansur decided on something nobody had done: to send a whole army across the desert. In 1590 he gave command to Judar Pasha, an officer of Spanish birth. The army numbered a few thousand men, many of them armed with muskets, with light cannon carried in pieces on camels. They crossed the Sahara in about four months and lost many men and animals on the way.

Part twoTondibi

The Songhai king, Askia Ishaq II, gathered a much larger army, with cavalry and infantry armed with spears and bows. In March 1591 the two armies met at Tondibi, north of Gao. The Songhai had planned to drive a herd of cattle into the Moroccan lines, but the sound of the guns turned the cattle back on their own side. Muskets and cannon broke the Songhai charges, and the army was routed.

Ishaq fled and sued for peace, offering gold and the salt mines if the Moroccans would leave. Al-Mansur refused and sent a new commander. The Moroccans took Gao and then Timbuktu. Songhai resistance went on for years in the south, but the empire as a single state was finished.

Part threeThe scholars of Timbuktu

The new rulers did not trust the scholars of Timbuktu, who were leaders of the town and might lead it against them. In 1593 many of them were arrested, and their libraries were scattered. Ahmad Baba, the city's most famous scholar, was sent in chains to Marrakesh with his family. He lost his library, which he said was among the smaller ones of his family, yet still held about 1,600 books.

Even in exile he was respected. Students in Marrakesh gathered to hear him, and he taught and wrote there for years. He was allowed to go home in 1607, after al-Mansur's death, and he died in Timbuktu in 1627.

Part fourWhat remained

The Moroccan conquest did not bring Morocco the riches it hoped for. Over time the soldiers left in the Niger towns married local women and became a ruling class of their own, the Arma, under pashas who soon stopped answering to Marrakesh. Trade across the Sahara weakened, as European ships began to carry West African gold from the Atlantic coast instead.

Yet the faith did not depend on the empires. Songhai families moved east, and towns such as Say, in what is now Niger, grew into religious centres. Teachers went on travelling, students went on copying books, and families went on guarding their libraries in Timbuktu, Djenné and Chinguetti. Two centuries later, scholars of the same tradition, such as Usman dan Fodio, would lead a great revival in the Hausa lands. Today the large majority of the people of Mali, Niger and Senegal are Muslim, and the manuscripts of Timbuktu are still being read.

The empire fell in a day at Tondibi, but the learning of the Niger outlived it.

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The mapWhere it happened

• Marrakesh
• Taghaza
• Tondibi
• Gao
• Timbuktu
• Djenné
• Say

This map is a simple sketch to help you picture where events took place. Positions, distances and borders are approximate, so please use it for reference only, not as an accurate map.

SourcesSources for this chapter