The Battle of Anfao

Sunni Ali Ber drowned in the water of a river in November 1492, on his way back from campaign, and the throne at Gao passed to his son Sonni Baru. Baru had served under his father, knew the army and knew the Songhay heartland, and he made one choice early that would cost him everything: he told the scholars of Timbuktu that nothing would change, that the syncretistic royal religion of his father would remain the religion of the court. To the merchants, to the jurists and to a good part of the officer corps this was not continuity but a closed door.

Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr refused to swear loyalty to the new king, gathered the troops who answered to him, and began to say in public what he had kept private for years: that Songhay should be an Islamic state in substance and not only in form, that the sharia should govern, that the ulema should be restored to their authority. Three constituencies came in behind him. The scholars of Timbuktu supplied the thing no army can supply for itself, a formal ruling that Baru’s conduct disqualified him and that removing him was lawful, which turned a mutiny into a jihad against an unjust ruler.

The two forces came up against one another at a place the chronicles call Anfao, and according to the Tarikh al-Sudan they stood there for several days before anyone fought. Muhammad sent envoys across with an offer: Baru should step aside in favour of a regency that would hold the empire together, and no one need be killed for it. Baru refused. The chronicle adds that his mother was among the voices pressing him to fight, on the reasoning that a peaceful handover would finish her son’s position and her own.

When it finally came, the fighting was short. Baru’s cavalry went in against Muhammad’s foot and broke on it, partly because the ground had been badly chosen and partly because a good number of the men riding it had already decided this was not their quarrel. By the end of the day the king’s generals were leaving the field ahead of the king. The Dutch article, reading the Tarikh al-Sudan, calls this shorter and less bloody than the Songhay battles that came later and puts the dead at several hundred; no other account consulted gives a figure at all.

The Sonni host came apart and scattered, and the king went out with a small escort after his commanders had already gone. Where he went is the point at which the sources stop agreeing with each other. Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr did not chase him far that day; he turned instead toward the capital, and sent expeditions after Baru later in the same year, beating him a second time and pushing the Sonni line out of every position of power it still held.

Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr entered the capital, took the throne under a new dynastic title, Askia, and moved fast. The Aqit were restored and their confiscated property returned, the Maliki school was formalised as the school of the empire, qadis were appointed in every town that mattered with a line of accountability running back to the court, and bori practice was pushed out of public space while being left alone in private. Within months Maghrebi caravans were coming to Gao in greater numbers than they had in years. It was also, plainly, a coup: men of the old regime were killed or driven into exile and land was redistributed to pay the coalition that had made it possible.