Songhai: Sunni Ali, Askia Muhammad, and the End of the Sahelian Empires

The Songhai people had long settled along the middle Niger River, with Gao as their principal urban center from at least the seventh or eighth century, well before the kingdom became an imperial capital; for centuries Songhai was a tributary, first of Ghana and later of Mali. It broke free as Mali weakened in the fifteenth century, and Sunni Ali, who reigned from 1464 to 1492 and is regarded as the founder of the Songhai Empire, took the nickname "Ber," meaning "the Great" in the Songhai language. He waged an intense military campaign to expand Songhai's territory, conquering Timbuktu from the Tuareg in 1468 — an episode remembered negatively by local chroniclers, who accused him of reprisals against the city — and taking Djenné around 1473 after a long siege, using a river fleet on the Niger to project his power. His relationship with the Islamic scholars of Timbuktu was tense, since they considered him a ruler of questionable religious orthodoxy, and he died in 1492 under unclear circumstances, possibly drowned during a military campaign.