Sonni Ali

The transformation of Songhai from a regional kingdom centered on Gao into the dominant empire of the western Sudan was chiefly the work of Sonni Ali, who ruled from 1464 until his death in 1492. He belonged to the Sonni (or Shi) dynasty, which traced its origins to princes of Gao who, according to tradition, had freed the kingdom from Malian overlordship in the fourteenth century. By the time of his accession, Mali's authority over the middle Niger had largely collapsed, leaving the river cities exposed to Tuareg and Mossi pressure.

Sonni Ali's reign was a nearly continuous military campaign. His most consequential conquest came in 1468, when he took Timbuktu from its Tuareg overlords, reportedly at the invitation of factions within the city. The occupation was violent, and the scholarly families of Timbuktu, many with ties to the departing Tuareg, suffered killings, persecution, and flight, with a number of the ulama withdrawing to Walata. In 1473, after a siege that the chronicles describe as lasting several years, he captured Djenné, the other great commercial city of the Niger bend, bringing the wealth of the river trade under Songhai control. He also campaigned against the Mossi, the Fulani, and the Dogon, and developed a river fleet that was central to his military system.

His posthumous reputation is sharply colored by the sources. The principal accounts, the Tarikh al-Sudan and Tarikh al-Fattash, were written in Timbuktu in the seventeenth century by members of the scholarly class his armies had brutalized, and they portray him as a tyrant of doubtful piety — nominally Muslim but devoted to traditional Songhai religion and contemptuous of the learned. Oral tradition, by contrast, remembers him as a ruler of exceptional power, sometimes credited with magical abilities. Both portraits serve the interests of their tellers, and the man behind them is difficult to recover.

Sonni Ali died in late 1492, by the chronicles' account drowning while returning from a campaign, though some traditions allege foul play. His son Sonni Baru succeeded him but was overthrown within months by one of Ali's commanders, Muhammad Ture, who founded the Askia dynasty in 1493 and inherited the imperial structure Ali's conquests had created.