This exotic theater of power had a suitably dignified stage and numerous company. The Mansa’s audience chamber was a domed pavilion in which Andalusian poets sang. His bushland capital had a brick-built mosque. The strength of his army was cavalry. Images of Mali’s mounted soldiery survive in terra-cotta. Heavy-lidded aristocrats with lips curled in command and haughtily uptilted heads come crowned with crested helmets, riding rigidly on elaborately bridled horses. Some have cuirasses or shields on their backs, or strips of leather armor worn apron-fashion. Their mounts wear halters of garlands and have decorations incised into their flanks. The riders control them with short reins and taut arms, like practitioners of dressage. For most of the fourteenth century they were invincible, driving invaders from desert or forest out of the Sahel.
Around the Mediterranean, Maghrebi traders and travelers scattered stories about the fabled realm, like grains of sand dusted from expansive hands. The image of the Mansa’s splendor reached Europe. In Majorcan maps from the 1320s, and most lavishly in the Catalan Atlas of the early 1380s, the ruler of Mali appears like a Latin monarch, save only for his black face, bearded, crowned, and throned—a sovereign equal in standing to any Christian prince. “So abundant is the gold that is found in his country,” reads the text placed alongside his picture, “that this lord is the richest and noblest king in all the land.” 4 The image might have been transferred, with little modification, to a painting of the Three Kings of Christ’s epiphany—which was the context in which European artists regularly painted imaginary black kings at the time. And the black king’s gift to the divine infant would be the mighty gold nugget the Mansa brandished in the map.
Europeans strove to cut out the middlemen and find routes of access to the gold sources for themselves. Some of them tried to follow the caravans over the desert. In 1413 the trader Ansleme d’Isaguier returned to his native Toulouse with a harem of negresses and three black eunuchs, whom he claimed to have acquired in Gao, one of the great emporia of the middle Niger. No one knows how he can have got so far. In 1447, the Genoese Antonio Malfante reached Tuat, garnering only rumors about the gold. In 1470, in Florence, Benedetto Dei claimed to have been to Timbuktu and observed a lively trade there in European textiles. Between 1450 and 1490, Portuguese merchants strove to open a route toward the Niger across country from their newly founded trading station at Arguim on the Saharan coast, and succeeded in diverting some gold-bearing caravans to trade there.
Like every El Dorado, however, Mali and its people could be disappointing to those who actually got that far. “I repented of having come to their country,” Ibn Battuta complained, “because of their deficient manners and contempt for white men.” 5 By the middle of the fifteenth century, as Mali declined, impressions were generally unfavorable. The empire was in retreat, ground between the Tuareg of the desert and the Mossi of the forest. Usurpers eroded the edges, while factions subverted Mali at the center. The emperors lost control over great marketplaces along the Niger. Cut-price successors to the famed poets and scholars of earlier generations cheapened arts and learning at the court. When European explorers at last penetrated the empire in the 1450s, they were disillusioned. Where they had expected to find a great, bearded, nugget-wielding monarch, such as the Catalan Atlas depicted, they found only a poor, harassed, timorous ruler. New maps of the region cut out the image of the sumptuously arrayed Mansa and substituted crude drawings of a “stage nigger,” dangling simian sexual organs. It was a dramatic moment in the history of racism. Until then, white Westerners saw only positive images of blacks in paintings of the magi who acknowledged the baby Jesus. Or else they knew Africans as expensive domestic slaves who shared intimacies with their owners and displayed estimable talents, especially as musicians. Familiarity had not yet bred contempt.
Disdain for blacks as inherently inferior to other people and the pretense that reason and humanity are proportional to the pink pigment in Western flesh were new prejudices. Disgust with Mali fed them. Attitudes remained equivocal, but the balance of white assumptions tilted against blacks. If white respect for black societies had survived the encounter with Mali, how different might the subsequent history of the world have been? Mass enslavement of blacks would not have been averted, for Islam and the Mediterranean world already relied heavily on the African slave trade. But the subordination of the black world would surely have been contested early and with more authority—and therefore, perhaps, with more success.
While Europeans beheld Mali’s travails with disappointment, the empire’s neighbors contemplated the same developments with glee. For the pagan, forest-dwelling Mossi, advancing from the south, Mali was like a beast felled for scavenging: bits could be picked off. For the Tuareg, raiding from the desert to the north, the stricken emperors were potential vassals to be manipulated or milked. In the last third of the fifteenth century, rulers of the people known as Songhay, whose lands bordered Mali to the east, began to conceive a grander ambition: they would supplant Mali altogether.
Historians called the ruling family of Songhay the Sonni, though that seems to have been the most commonly used of their titles rather than a family name. They were a long-lived dynasty, founded, so the legend said, by a dragon slayer who invented the harpoon and used it to liberate the peoples of the Niger from a sorcerer-serpent. Since then, by 1492, eighteen of his heirs had reigned successively, according to most traditional counts. We can recognize the legend as a typical story of a stranger-king who brings the glamour and objectivity of an outsider to power struggles he can transcend and ends up as ruler.
The historical record of the Sonni began in the early fourteenth century, when they were governors of Gao, as restless subordinates of Mali. Gao was an impressive city, unwalled and, said Leo Africanus, full of “exceeding rich merchants.” Hundreds of straight, long, interlocking streets with identical houses surrounded a great marketplace specializing in slaves. You could buy seven slave girls for a fine horse and, of course, swap salt for gold or sell Maghrebi and European textiles. There were wholesome wells, and corn, melons, lemons, and rice as abundant as flesh. The governor’s palace was filled with concubines and slaves. “It is a wonder to see what plentie of Merchandize is dayly brought hither,” wrote Leo Africanus in the version of his work produced by a sixteenth-century English translator, “and how costly and sumptuous all things be.” Horses cost four or five times as much as in Europe. Fine scarlet cloth from Venice or Turkey commanded thirty times its Mediterranean price. “But of all other commodities salt is the most extremelie deere.” 6
The city’s governors had plenty of opportunities for self-enrichment, and plenty of temptations to declare independence. To ensure good behavior, the Mansa Musa took the ruler’s children as hostages when he passed through Gao in 1325. But such measures could have only temporary effects. The Sonni were free of Malian supremacy by early in the fifteenth century. Probably around 1425, Sonni Muhammad Dao felt secure enough to lead a raid against Mali, reaching Jenne, seizing Mande captives, and generating legends.
The Sonni bestowed on their children such names as Ali, Mohammad, and Umar, suggesting a commitment to Islam or at least familiarity with it. For centuries, Islam had overspilled the Sahara, lapping the kings and courts of the western African bulge. As early as the ninth century, Arab visitors to Soninke chiefdoms and kingdoms noted that some people followed “the king’s religion”—some form of pre-Islamic paganism—while others were Muslims. Although Islam made little documented progress in West Africa before the eleventh century, immigration and acculturation along the Saharan trade routes prepared the way for Islamization. The main reasons for Muslims to go to the “the Land of the Blacks” were commercial, although they also went south to make war, find patronage if they were scholars or artists, and make converts to Islam. On this frontier, therefore, Islam lacked professional missionaries, but occasionally a Muslim merchant might interest a trading partner or even a pagan ruler in Islam.
A late-eleventh-century Arab compiler of
information about West Africa tells such a story, from Malal, south of the Senegal. At a time of terrible drought, a Muslim guest advised the king of the consequences if he accepted Islam: “You would bring Allah’s mercy on the people of your country, and your enemies would envy you.” Rain duly fell after prayers and Quranic recitations. “Then the king ordered that the idols be broken and the sorcerers expelled. The king, together with his descendants and the nobility, became sincerely attached to Islam, but the common people remained pagans.” 7
As well as peaceful missionizing, war spread Islam. The region’s first well-documented case of Islamization by jihad occurred in the Soninke kingdom of Ghana in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This kingdom anticipated Mali and Songhay, thriving on the taxation of trans-Saharan trade and occupying a similar environment around the upper Niger, somewhat to the east of Mali’s future heartland. In the mid–eleventh century the Almoravids—as Westerners call the al-Murabitun, a movement of warrior-ascetics—burst out of the desert, conquering an empire from Spain to the Sahel. They targeted Ghana as the home of “sorcerers,” where, according to collected reports, the people buried their dead with gifts, “made offerings of alcohol,” and kept a sacred snake in a cave. Muslims—presumably traders—had their own large quarter in or near the Ghanaian capital, Kumbi Saleh, but apart from the royal quarter of the town. The Soninke fought off Almoravid armies with some success until 1076. In that year, Kumbi fell, and its defenders were massacred. The northerners’ political hold south of the Sahara did not last, but the struggle of Islam against paganism continued.
Spanish and Sicilian travelers’ reports give us later snapshots of the history of Ghana. The most extensive account is full of sensational and salacious tales praising the slave women, excellent at cooking “sugared nuts and honeyed donuts,” and with good figures, firm breasts, slim waists, fat buttocks, wide shoulders, and sexual organs “so narrow that one of them may be enjoyed as though she were a virgin indefinitely.”8 But a vivid picture emerges of a kingdom with three or four prosperous, populous towns, productive in copper work, cured hides, dyed robes, and Atlantic ambergris as well as gold. The authors also make clear the means by which Islam spread in the region, partly by settlement of Maghrebi merchants in the towns, and partly by the efforts of individual holy men or pious merchants establishing relationships of confidence with kings. Interpreters and officials were already typically Muslims, and every town had several mosques, but even rulers sympathetic to Islam maintained their traditional court establishments, and what Muslims called “idols” and “sorcerers.”
By the mid–twelfth century, Islam was clearly in the ascendant. Arab writers regarded Ghana as a model Islamic state, whose king revered the true caliph in Baghdad and dispensed justice with exemplary openness. They admired his well-built palace, with its objects of art and windows of glass; the huge natural ingot of gold that was the symbol of his authority; the gold ring by which he tethered his horse; his silk clothes; his elephants and giraffes. “In former times,” reported a scholar based in Spain, “the people of the country professed paganism…. Today there are Muslims and they have scholars, lawyers, and Koran readers and have become pre-eminent in these fields. Some of their chief leaders…have travelled to Mecca and made the pilgrimage and visited the Prophet’s tomb.” 9
Archaeology confirms this picture. Excavations at Kumbi reveal a town nearly one and a half square miles, founded in the tenth century, housing perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand people, with a regular plan and evidence of large, multistoried buildings, including what excavators have designated as nine-roomed “mansions” and a great mosque. Artifacts include glass weights for weighing gold, many finely wrought metal tools, and evidence of a local form of money.10 This magnificence did not last. After a long period of stagnation or decline, pagan invaders overran the Soninke state and destroyed Kumbi. But Islam had spread so widely by then among the warriors and traders of the Sahel that it retained a foothold south of the Sahara for the rest of the Middle Ages.
The big questions, for the history of the world, were: How tenacious would that hold prove? How far would it extend? How deep would Islam penetrate? And how would it change the way people lived and thought? For the future of Islam in West Africa, the attitude of Songhay’s rulers was critical.
For in Songhay, Islam remained superficial. The kings relied on the Muslim intelligentsia of Gao for scribes, bureaucrats, encomiasts, and diplomats at literate courts. But they also had to wield the traditional magic of their people. To rule Songhay, a leader had to combine uneasily compatible roles as a good Muslim and a good magus, both at the same time. He had to be what his people called a dali—both king and shaman, endowed with powers of prophecy, capable of contacting the spirits as well as praying to God.
Sonni Ali Ber—“Ber” means “Great”—who succeeded to the throne in the 1460s, had been raised in his mother’s land, around Sokoto. Here Islam had barely arrived and was hardly practiced, even in the royal court. Sonni Ali drank djitti, the magic potion that protected against witchcraft, literally with his mother’s milk. He knew something of Islam. He learned bits of the Quran in childhood. His parents submitted him to be circumcised. But he always seemed to prefer paganism: at least, that is how the sources—all written by clerics or their cronies—represent him. Some of his objectively verifiable behavior seems to match his anticlerical reputation. Rather than residing in Gao, for instance, which was cosmopolitan, and therefore Muslim, Sonni Ali preferred the second city of his kingdom, Koukya, a palace town where caravans did not come.
The way the kingdom worked bound Sonni Ali to an ancient, pagan past. Songhay was a tributary state. At Sonni Ali’s birth, tribute of millet and rice converged from around the kingdom. Forty head each of oxen, heifers, goats, and chickens were decapitated and the meat distributed to the poor. It was an ancient rite of agrarian kingship, for the king’s role was to garner food and control its warehousing, ensuring equitable shares for all and stocks against times of famine. Iron tribute arrived, forged in fires lit by the bellows of the fire god. Each smith paid a hundred lances and a hundred arrows a year for the king’s army. Of twenty-four subject peoples who supplied the palace slaves, each paid special tribute: fodder for the king’s horses, dried fish, cloth.
Dominion of the river was vital to making the system work, for the Niger was the great highway that linked the forest to the desert. But to possess the river, control over the Sahel was indispensable. Sonni Ali knew that and acted accordingly. His reputation for cruelty owed much to embellishment by his clerical foes, but something, too, to his own strategy. To conquer, he had to inspire fear. He drove back the Tuareg and Mossi—the previously unconquerable warrior bands around the upper Volta—and ruled by razzia, descending periodically on his tributaries’ lands to enforce their compliance. He built three palace garrisons around his kingdom to facilitate control.
He established a monopoly or near-monopoly of violence and cowed the kingdom into peace. Sonni Ali’s peace favored trade and especially, therefore, the elites of the Niger Valley towns. At the time, Timbuktu was the greatest of them—“exquisite, pure, delicious, illustrious, blessed, lively, rich.” Leo Africanus described the notable buildings: the houses of Timbuktu of clay-covered wattles with thatched roofs, the great mosque of stone and mortar, the governor’s palace, the “very numerous” shops of the artisans, the merchants, and especially weavers of cotton cloth. Like every vibrant urban space, the city was “very much endangered by fire.” Leo saw half of it burn “in the space of five hours” as a violent wind fanned the flames and the inhabitants of the other half of the city shunted their belongings to safety.11
“The inhabitants,” he reported, “are very rich,” especially the immigrant Maghrebi elite of merchants and scholars, who generated so much demand for books imported from the Maghreb that—so Leo claimed—“there is more profit made from this commerce than from all other merchandise.” The people, Leo declared, “are of a peaceful nature. They hav
e a custom of almost continuously walking about the city in the evening (except for those that sell gold), between ten and one o’clock, playing musical instruments and dancing…. The citizens have at their service many slaves, both men and women. The women of the city maintain the custom of veiling their faces, except for the slaves who sell all the foodstuffs.” 12
Gold nuggets and cowrie shells were exchanged for salt, which was “in very short supply,” slaves, European textiles, and horses. “Only small, poor horses,” according to Leo, “are born in this country. The merchants use them for their voyages and the courtiers to move about the city. But the good horses come from Barbary. They arrive in a caravan and, ten or twelve days later, they are led to the ruler, who takes as many as he likes and pays appropriately for them.” 13
By Sonni Ali’s time, Malian sovereignty over Timbuktu was nominal. The city was poised between two potential masters: the Tuareg herdsmen of the desert, against whom the Malians could no longer offer protection, and the Sonni. Preserving effective independence required a careful balancing act, playing off the rivals against one another. In the early years of Ali’s reign, Muhammad Nad, the wily old governor of Timbuktu, treated the Sonni with circumspection—appeasing him with tribute and deterring him with the threat of Tuareg intervention. The magnificence of Muhammad Nad’s court was fit for a king. Leo describes him riding a camel, hearing pleas from prostrate subjects, and garnering a treasure of coins, ingots, and immense gold nuggets. This wealth paid for an army of “about three thousand horsemen and infinity of foot soldiers.” War was waged for tribute and captives: “[W]hen he has gained a victory, he has all of them—even the children—sold in the market at Timbuktu.” Still, Muhammad Nad knew how to defer when it mattered. He joined Sonni Ali in his first campaigns of conquest against the forest dwellers to the south: participation in campaigns was a rite of submission, part of the normal relationship of tributaries to their lords.
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