Muhammad Nad’s son and successor, Ammar, was less diplomatic. Resentful of admitting to being Songhay’s dependant, he sent a letter of defiance: “My father quit this life possessing nothing but a linen shroud. The force of arms at my disposal surpasses belief. Let him who doubts it come and count.” But it soon became obvious that he could not do without Songhayan help. When the Tuareg descended on the town and intimidated him into releasing part of the governor’s traditional income from tolls on the trade of the river, Ammar cut a deal with the Sonni. He was entertaining Akil, the Tuareg chief, in January 1468, when a cloud of dust appeared on the horizon.
“A sandstorm,” ventured the host.
“You have wasted your eyes on books,” replied Akil. “My eyes are old, but I can see the armed horsemen approaching.” 14
The Tuareg abandoned Timbuktu to Sonni Ali, who—so tradition asserted—likened the city to a woman “rolling her eyes in terror and sashaying her body to seduce us.” 15 The mullahs, however, did not join in the seductive performance or the submissive posture of the governor and merchant elite. They supported the Tuareg. It is hard to separate cause and effect: were the clergy repelled by Sonni Ali’s paganism? Or was his identification with the old gods part of his response to clerical hostility? In any event, his overtly contemptuous and vindictive treatment of them became obvious for the remaining years of his reign.
It seems more convincing to see his attitude as part of the power play that balanced factions in Timbuktu than to suppose that he practiced anticlericalism out of pagan devotion or principled detestation of the mullahs. Anticlericalism and piety are not incompatible, and Ali’s religious views and sentiments seem to have been much more deeply imbued with reverence for Islam than clerical propaganda made out. Sonni Ali performed the holiday prayers of Ramadan year by year during his campaigns. “Despite his ill treatment of scholars,” reported a late but generally fair chronicler, “he acknowledged their worth and often said, ‘Without the clergy the world would no longer be sweet and good.’” 16 Muhammad Nad’s sons and grandsons, by contrast, were lax in performing Muslim rites. Yet they incurred much less clerical obloquy.
On the other hand, evidence of Sonni Ali’s hostility toward the city patriciate of Timbuktu is ample, especially in an intense period of mutual distrust from 1468 to 1473. Muhammad Nad had been a great friend to the city’s elite, as Leo Africanus observed. “There are in Timbuktu numerous judges, teachers and priests, all properly appointed” by Muhammad Nad, who “greatly honors learning.” 17 Ali abjured this attitude, treated the city with disdain, and rarely paused there on his progresses around the kingdom.
His conquest provoked a massive exodus of the elite. A caravan of one thousand camels took the exiles to Walata, where they could rely on Tuareg protection, while Ali killed, enslaved, or imprisoned the children of one of the chief judges of the city, And-agh-Muhammad al-Kabir. He humiliated—the chroniclers are not explicit about the details—the family of the other, al-qadi al-Hajj, and massacred a party of them who tried to flee to Walata. His policy was not solely to do with vengeance, but was also designed to contain potential opposition within Songhay, for al-Hajj was close to the family of Sonni Ali’s lieutenant and most successful general, Askia Muhammad—the only possible rival to the Sonni’s supremacy. Rebellion, massacre, and a further exodus followed in 1470 or 1471. The feud between Ali and Timbuktu was beginning to damage the kingdom. The new refugees sewed martyrdom stories among exiles and initiated the implacably hostile scholarly tradition against Ali. Worse for the Sonni’s revenues, the decline of the city disrupted trade.
By now, however, Sonni Ali was beginning to feel secure. In 1471 (or perhaps a little later—the chronology of the sources is confused), he conquered Jenne, despite the fire ships the defenders launched against the Songhayan fleet. Jenne was the last and largest of the great river ports of the Niger, where the call from the great minaret, so it was said, echoed in seven thousand places. Ali had now constructed an empire comparable in extent to Mali at its height. Consolidation rather than conquest became his main aim. From about 1477, for eight or nine years, he tried to rebuild his relationship with Timbuktu’s patricians and scholars, and reinvigorate the kingdom’s trade. He projected a canal from Niger to Walata, though he never got around to building it. To the office of chief judge of Timbuktu, he appointed a descendant of a sage whom Mansa Musa had brought to the Sahel: it was an emphatic gesture of deference to tradition. He sent women captured on campaigns against the Fulani as a present to the scholars of Timbuktu—though some of the recipients treated the gift as an insult. If Ali’s intentions were good, they were too little too late. Renewed war with the Mossi interrupted his plans for reconstruction and provoked him into a new bout of repression.
In 1485 he dismissed Muhammad Nad’s son from the governorship of Timbuktu and installed a nominee of his own. Probably in 1488, he ordered what the chroniclers call the “evacuation” of Timbuktu.18 Other evidence does not support clerical sources’ picture of a devastated and depopulated city; so this was probably just the expulsion of suspect families. The clergy intensified their countercampaign of propaganda. Sonni Ali became a bogeyman for the godly. In Egypt his rise was reported as a calamity for Islam, comparable to the loss of al-Andalus to Christian conquerors. In 1487, mullahs in Mecca raised imprecations against him. A Maghrebi jurist later denied that Ali was a Muslim at all.19 Meanwhile, back in the Sahel, Ali’s priority for war continued to shift power from the mullahs and merchants to warrior chiefs.
Askia Muhammad Touray was the greatest of them. As one of Ali’s closest companions, commanders, and counselors, he evinced total loyalty, but the Sonni’s opponents naturally cast him as their potential champion, or at least as an intermediary whose favor they needed. Askia Muhammad’s popularity and success were vexing to Sonni Baro, the heir to the throne. Baro tried to arouse in his father suspicions against Muhammad by alleging that the general’s Muslim piety implied alliance with traitorous clergy.
The charges had some credibility. Muhammad had tried to save massacre victims in Timbuktu and had used his influence to moderate Sonni Ali’s anticlerical excesses. In consequence he had a powerful constituency of admirers and partisans, especially in the city that regarded him as its protector. Sonni Baro, by contrast, was a hateful figure, identified with all his father’s most obnoxious traits—his adherence to pagan forms, his humbling of the clerics, his oppression of Timbuktu. By December 1492, when news arrived that Sonni Ali had died, many of the mullahs and merchants were ready to incite rebellion. Askia Muhammad was in Timbuktu when news of the king’s death broke there on January 1, 1493.
One of the elite messengers, trained to spend up to ten days in the saddle and cross the entire kingdom, arrived with a breathless message:
Ali the Great, your master and mine, king of Songhay, star of the world, shining sun of our hearts, terror of our enemies, died ten days ago…. He was on his way back to Gao from an expedition…. As he was crossing a small tributary of the Niger, a sudden swell arose and carried off our lord, his horse, his baggage, and his train in the surging waves. The army watched powerless from the shore. I was there. We could do nothing. It all happened so fast.20
The citizens of the town came out of their dwellings and raised the cry: “The tyrant is dead! Long live King Muhammad!” But their hero cut short a preacher who denounced the memory of “the impious and terrible tyrant, the worst oppressor ever known, the destroyer of cities, of hard and cruel heart, who killed so many men whose names are known to God alone and who treated the learned and godly with humiliation and contempt.” 21 Muhammad’s display of loyalty to his dead master only increased his devout reputation and the clamor for him to be king. Chroniclers gilded his iron ambition with the gleam of piety.
He was reluctant—so it was said—to accept the throne. The people besought him; the army acclaimed him. Messengers from the old king’s deathbed assured him that Ali had wanted him to save the kingdom from Sonni Baro’s i
mpiety or incompetence. The truth is that Muhammad dared not defer to Sonni Baro. For too long, they had been rivals in the old king’s esteem, and contenders for influence over him. Muhammad marched against Baro, claiming to demand from him accession to the true faith. It was an old and enduring pretext for violence: jihad against an alleged apostate.
The surviving chronicles, which are uniformly favorable to Askia Muhammad, portray Sonni Baro preparing for battle in drugged ecstasy, communing with his idols, especially Za Beri Wandu, the god who begot the river Niger. A sorcerer conjured for Baro a vision of his father’s spirit. Baro saw the ghost’s lips move but heard nothing. The medium gave him the message: “[T]he king rejoices in your valor and urges you to combat Islam courageously.” Sonni Baro, meanwhile, treated Muhammad’s emissary, an old sheikh who brought the insulting demand for repentance and conversion, to a display of magic. A fakir disgorged a chain of pure gold. Another made a tree shake in a windless landscape. When the sheikh tried to escape the scene of devilry, Sonni Baro himself rose and beat him almost to death. “I reign by right of birth,” he cried, “and the protection of the gods.” 22
To the chroniclers who recorded or constructed this scene, it was a double blasphemy, for only Allah conferred kingship. False auguries deceived Baro, even at the height of the battle that followed. The decisive element in Muhammad’s victory, however, seems not to have been supernatural intervention, but the Tuareg allies who descended from the desert in his support.
It was one of the great decisive battles of the world—though Western tradition has forgotten or ignored it. Sonni Baro owed nothing to the mullahs and had every reason to arrest the spread of Islam south of the Sahara. Had he triumphed, Islam might have been stopped at the edge of the Sahel. Askia Muhammad, on the other hand, owed his throne to Muslims and invested heavily in practicing and promoting their religion. In 1497, he reenacted the most ostentatious of the displays of piety of the Mansas of Mali by making a pilgrimage to Mecca with one thousand foot soldiers and five hundred horse, bidding to emulate the Mansa Musa’s dazzling retinue. He legitimized his usurpation of power in Songhay by submitting his claim to the throne to the Sharif of Mecca. On his return to Songhay in 1498, he adopted the title of caliph—the most ambitious claim any ruler could make to the legacy of the Prophet.
Muhammad’s reason for arrogating the title to himself perhaps owed something to regional power struggles: Ali Ghadj, the redoubtable king of Bornu—the state that straddled the Sahel around Lake Chad—used the same title until his death in 1497. Bornu was a warrior state, exchanging slaves for horses. Ali Ghadj’s successor, Idris Katakarmabi, was on the throne when Leo Africanus turned up. He found Bornu rich in rare kinds of grain and with wealthy merchants in the villages, but the highland people were naked or clad in skins. “They embrace no religion at all,…living in a brutish manner, and having wives and children in common.” Still, Bornu had three thousand horsemen, and huge numbers of infantry, maintained by a tithe of the people’s grain and the spoils of war. Though stingy with merchants—so merchants said—“the king seemeth to be marveilous rich; for his spurres, his bridles, platters, dishes, pots, and other vessels…are all of pure golde: yea, and the chaines of his dogs and hounds are of golde also.” 23 Bornu, in short, was a major regional power against which the parvenu Songhayan state had to measure itself. In any case, the style of caliph fitted Muhammad’s Muslim self-projection. When he made war, he called it jihad.
Islam’s progress was now irreversible. That does not mean that it was uncontested or unlimited. Paganism, though bloodied and bowed, survived. In the long run it was ineradicable, subsisting as a form of popular religion or “alternative” subculture, and always polluting Islam with syncretic influences. When conspirators deposed the aging Askia Muhammad in 1529 and confined him to an island in the Niger, his heirs slid back into ambiguous practices reminiscent of those of Sonni Ali.
Moreover, even while Sonni Ali died in the Niger, a newly arrived religion was intruding in sub-Saharan West Africa. As a rival to Islam, Christianity had one big advantage: its adherents carried it by sea. They could outflank Islam and dodge the forests, reaching directly deep into tropical Africa via the coasts.
The first outpost was the fort that Portuguese explorers founded in 1482 at São Jorge da Mina, on the underbelly of the African bulge, near the mouths of the rivers Benya and Pra, about a hundred kilometers from the Volta. For over half a century, the Portuguese had justified their slave raids and trading ventures on the coast of the African Atlantic as part of a crusade to spread Christianity. The ambitious prince Dom Henrique, whom historians call “the Navigator” (rather misleadingly, as he made only two short sea trips), sponsored the voyages until his death in 1460, with support from successive popes, and sent expeditions as far as what is now Sierra Leone; but he never honored his promises to send missionaries to the region. Spanish friars strove to fill the gap, but the Portuguese detested them as foreign agents, and they made little or no progress. The merchants and private entrepreneurs who ran the Portuguese effort from 1469 to 1475 had no reason to waste hardnosed investment on spiritual objectives.
In 1475, however, the crown took over the enterprise, perhaps in order to confront Spanish interlopers. West African navigation became the responsibility of the senior prince of the royal house, the infante Dom João. Henceforth, Portugal had an heir and, from his accession in 1481, a king committed to the further exploration and exploitation of Africa. He seems to have conceived of the African Atlantic as a sort of “Portuguese main,” fortified by coastal trading establishments. Numerous informal and unfortified Portuguese outposts already dotted the Senegambia region. Freelance expatriates set most of them up, “going native” as they did so. Dom João, however, had a militant and organizing mentality, forged in the war he waged against Spanish interlopers on the Guinea coast between 1475 and 1481.
When he sent one hundred masons and carpenters to build the fort of São Jorge, therefore, he was doing something new: inaugurating a policy of permanent footholds, disciplined trading, and royal initiatives. The natives could see and fear the transformation for themselves. A local chief said that he had preferred the “ragged and ill dressed men who had traded there before.” 24 Another prong of the new policy was the centralization of the African trade at Lisbon, in warehouses below the royal palace, where all sailings had to be registered and all cargo stored. An even more important element in João’s plan was the cultivation of friendly relations with powerful coastal chieftains: the Wolof chiefs of Senegambia; the rulers—or “obas,” as they were called—of the lively port city of Benin; and ultimately—much farther south—the kings of Kongo. Conversion to Christianity was not essential for good relations—but it helped. In Europe, it served to legitimize Portugal’s privileged presence in a region where other powers coveted the chance to trade. In Africa, it could create a bond between the Portuguese and their hosts.
Dom João therefore presided over an extraordinary turnover in baptisms and rebaptisms of rapidly apostatizing black chiefs. In one extraordinary political pantomime in 1488, he entertained an exiled Wolof potentate to a full regal reception, for which the visitor was decked out with European clothes and the table laden with silver plate.25 Farther east along the coast, Portuguese missionary effort was still feeble, but the fort of São Jorge was Christianity’s shopwindow in the region, contriving an attractive display. Its wealth and dimensions were modest, but mapmakers depicted it as a splendid place, with high fortifications, pennanted turrets, and gleaming spires—a sort of black Camelot. It had no explicit missionary role, but it did have resident chaplains, who became foci of inquiries from local leaders and their rivals, who realized that they could get help in the form of Portuguese technicians and weapons if they expressed an interest in Christianity. The obas of Benin played the game with some skill, never actually committing to the Church but garnering aid like supermarket customers targeting “special offers.” Not much came of any of the contacts, in terms
of real Christianization, and in competition in the region neither Christianity nor Islam was very effective at first. But West Africa had become what it has remained ever since: an arena of spiritual enterprise in which Islam and Christianity contended for religious allegiance.
Farther south, where Portuguese ships reached but where Muslim merchants and missionaries were unknown, was the kingdom of Kongo. Here people responded to Christianity with an enthusiasm wholly disproportionate to Portugal’s lackluster attempts at conversion. The kingdom dominated the Congo River’s navigable lower reaches, probably from the mid–fourteenth century. The ambitions of its rulers became evident when Portuguese explorers established contact in the 1480s. In 1482, battling against the Benguela Current, Diogo Cão reached the shores of the kingdom. Follow-up voyages brought emissaries from Kongo to Portugal and bore Portuguese missionaries, craftsmen, and mercenaries in the reverse direction.
In Kongo, the rulers sensed at once that the Portuguese could be useful to them. They greeted them with a grand parade, noisy with horns and drums. The king, brandishing his horsetail whisk and wearing his ceremonial cap of woven palm fiber, sat on an ivory throne smothered with the gleaming pelts of lions. He graciously commanded the Portuguese to build a church, and when protesters murmured at the act of sacrilege to the old gods, he offered to put them to death on the spot. The Portuguese piously demurred.
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