Sonni Ali Ber

A sovereign who turned his realm into a center of power and his own ulama into an enemy. The two tarikh chronicles that describe him wrote his story with a wrath that bleeds through to this day.

Life

Sonni Ali, whose honorific Ber means “the great”, came to power in 1464 as the fourteenth ruler of the Sonni dynasty of Gao, and in twenty-eight years of reign brought a regional kingdom to the first true Songhai Empire. His birth year is unknown; his lineage is Songhai on the paternal side, with a mother from the animist Fara community of Sokoto according to later tradition. That double descent, Islamic court on one side and traditional magico-religious maternal line on the other, would mark his entire reign.

When he ascended the throne, the Mali Empire that Mansa Musa had once extended from the Atlantic coast to beyond Gao was severely weakened. Tuareg federations had held Timbuktu under shifting suzerainty since 1433; local agitations and Mossi raids had made the Niger Bend an unsafe region. Sonni Ali advanced hard. His first great deed was the capture of Timbuktu, 260 kilometers upstream from Gao, in 1468, after driving out the Tuareg lord Akil. For him this was a military triumph. For the Sankoré ulama of Timbuktu it became a trauma.

According to the Tarikh al-Sudan of Abd al-Rahman al-Sa’di and the Tarikh al-Fattash, both seventeenth-century Timbuktu chronicles, Sonni Ali had scholars executed at the conquest of the city, libraries plundered, mosques desecrated. Part of the Sankoré ulama, including the Aqit family (ancestors of the later Ahmad Baba ﵀), fled to Walata, more than 600 kilometers westward, a city he never took and geographic proof of how thoroughly he had driven the Sankoré scholars out. The chronicles compare him to Pharaoh. They call him kafir, unbeliever, and they call his death a divine verdict.

Over the following years he campaigned in all directions. Mossi raids were beaten back, the Dogon of the Bandiagara escarpment were subjugated, and the Fulbe groups of Massina were fought with mixed success. And then came the siege of Jenné, in the inland delta of the Niger, a city on an island, surrounded by shallow water in the dry season and unreachable in the wet. Tradition gives a siege of seven years seven months and seven days; the reality was probably shorter periods of pressure spread over years. Eventually Jenné surrendered, probably around 1473, and Sonni Ali integrated the city into his empire and according to tradition married the mother of the defeated king as a sign of reconciliation.

He died in November 1492. According to the Tarikh al-Sudan he drowned in the Niger on the return from a campaign against the Gurma; another version speaks of natural death on the same journey, and a third, still later, of poisoning by his own circle. Whichever is the truth, with his death the fragile balance between the dynasty and the ulama bloc broke, and his son Sonni Baru was deposed within a year by Askia Muhammad.

Faith and culture

Sonni Ali called himself a Muslim. He performed the Friday salat, he maintained mosques (insofar as strategically relevant), he used Islamic legitimating formulas. But he was at the same time a Songhai sovereign in the pre-Islamic sense: he had himself advised by sohantyè, magico-religious specialists with access to holey spirits, and he used rituals that were unthinkable in Sankoré fiqh. He danced ritually, he had amulets made, and he governed from a double register.

For the Sankoré ulama this was unforgivable, while for the population of the Niger villages it was familiar. The Tarikh al-Fattash, in the form in which we know it today and possibly in part a nineteenth-century Sokoto redaction, judges sharply. The verdict is not neutral: it is pronounced by the descendants of the scholars Sonni Ali had persecuted or driven out, and later by the Fulbe jihadists who had an interest in a simple contrast between “true Muslims” and “half-pagans”. The modern historian therefore reads these sources in their context, not as objective report.

Against this stands the fact that the Maghrebi jurist al-Maghili ﵀, who arrived in Gao shortly after Sonni Ali’s death, advised Askia Muhammad juridically that Sonni Ali (sic, no honorific here: he denied him Muslim status) had in fact never been a true Muslim and that his contracts, verdicts and acts could be retroactively declared invalid. This was a juridical atom bomb that at the same time pronounced a theological verdict, and that verdict has clung to his name ever since.

Legacy

Sonni Ali made Songhai an empire. That is fact, withdrawn from any chronicle distortion. The territorial base that Askia Muhammad would consolidate was laid by Sonni Ali: Gao as capital, Timbuktu and Jenné incorporated, the Niger under one fleet, a cavalry apparatus that remained competitive until the end of the sixteenth century.

Institutionally he left a mixed legacy. He built a centralized fleet, Songhai’s military strength on the Niger, and a provincial administrative system with military governors. But he did not build a juridical or scholastic infrastructure. That would later have to be installed by Askia Muhammad and al-Maghili ﵀.

His place in memory is restless. In the Timbuktu chronicles he is the tyrant. In the Songhai oral tradition he is Ber, the great, the sovereign who chastised the Mossi and the Tuareg, the ruler on whose name the empire rests. In modern Mali and Niger a slow revision is under way, and since the second half of the twentieth century historians like Sékéné Mody Cissoko and Mahmoud Zouber have pointed to the tarikh sources as partisan and to Sonni Ali’s state-building achievements as undervalued. Both images exist alongside each other.

What counts here is the methodological lesson: a historical figure cannot be reduced to what the victorious ulama write about him, nor to what later popular veneration idealizes. The honest reading acknowledges both, and seeks between them the actual man who had to govern in the political and religious complexity of fifteenth-century Songhai.

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Uncertainties:

The exact duration of the siege of Jenné is unknown, since the “seven years seven months seven days” is an oral-epic formula rather than chronicle data. Three traditions of his death in 1492 stand side by side, drowning, natural death and poisoning, and the Tarikh al-Sudan chooses drowning as a divine verdict, which is interpretation rather than proof. The authorship and dating of the Tarikh al-Fattash are equally unsettled: the work as known today is almost certainly a composite text with both seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century Sokoto layers, so that the anti-Sonni Ali tone is in part late-colored. The scope of the “executions of scholars” at the capture of Timbuktu in 1468 is uncertain as well, and the figures in the chronicles seem rhetorical rather than counting.

Sources

• ʿAbd ar-Rahman as-Saʿdi ﵀, Tarikh as-Sudan (Timbuktu, written between 1653 and 1656), chapter 12 on the reign of Sunni ʿAli and chapters 2, 5, 7 and 13 on the Sunni dynasty, Jenne, Timbuktu and the seizure of power by Askia Muhammad: the chronicle that calls him the great oppressor and ascribes his death to the Almighty, in the translation of Hunwick, pp. 8, 17, 20–21, 31, 33–34, 91–103.
• Mahmud Kaʿti ﵀ and Ibn al-Mukhtar ﵀, Tarikh al-Fattash, the second chronicle of Timbuktu, whose first chapter was forged in the early nineteenth century in favour of Ahmad Lobbo of Masina, as discussed in Gomez, p. 171, and in Hunwick, Shariʿa in Songhay, p. 45.
• Muhammad al-Maghili ﵀, Ajwibat (the replies to Askia al-Hajj Muhammad, Gao, c. 1498), the second question on Sonni Ali: his father the sultan of Songhay, his mother from the land of Far where idols are worshipped and soothsayers and magicians consulted, his prayer habits and the verdict that such conduct is unbelief, in the translation of Hunwick, Shariʿa in Songhay, pp. 69–70, 73, 75.
• John O. Hunwick (trans.), Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: al-Saʿdi’s Taʾrikh al-sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents, Brill, Leiden 2003 (2nd printing; 1st printing 1999), pp. xxxviii–xxxix, xliii, 8, 17, 20–21, 31, 33–34, 91–96, 99–100, 102–103.
  • pp. xxxviii–xxxix, xliii: the reign from 1464 to 1492 with Gao as capital and the Songhay lands down to Dendi as its heart; the army led by cavalry; the Mossi who attacked Walata in 1480; a ruler who was not a scrupulous practitioner of the faith; the offices of his day, among them the Hi-koi as commander of boats and the Tondi-farma as governor of the Bandiagara uplands.
  • pp. 8, 31, 91 (TS ch. 2, 7, 12): the accession in 869/1464–5 and the twenty-seven or twenty-eight years of rule; the authority of the Sunnis enlarged only under him; the Tuareg who held Timbuktu for forty years from 837/1433–4, after which his rule over the city began in 873/1468–9.
  • pp. 33–34, 93–94 (TS ch. 7, 12): the Tuareg lord Akil, the entry into Timbuktu in Rajab 873/January 1469, the burning and the killings; the flight of the Sankore scholars, among them ʿUmar ibn Muhammad Aqit ﵀ and his sons, on a thousand camels to Biru (Walata); the persecution of those who stayed behind until 875/1470–1.
  • pp. 17, 20–21 (TS ch. 5): Jenne at 13°55′ north and 4°33′ west, an island in the rainy season; the siege of seven years, seven months and seven days according to the tradition of the city; the surrender and the marriage with the mother of the young sultan.
  • pp. 92, 95–96, 99–100, 102–103 (TS ch. 12–13): the campaigns against the mountains (Bandiagara), the Fulbe of Sonfontera in Masina and the Mossi, defeated in 888/1483–4; his mockery of prayer; the death on 15 Muharram 898/6 November 1492 in a torrent at Kuna on the way back from Gurma, with the oral tradition that Askia Muhammad had him assassinated; the defeat of Sunni Abu Bakr (Baru) near Gao on 2 April 1493 and the mocking name a si kiya.
• John O. Hunwick (ed./trans.), Shariʿa in Songhay: The Replies of al-Maghili to the Questions of Askia al-Hajj Muhammad, Oxford University Press for the British Academy, Oxford 1985, pp. 22–26, 39, 41, 45, 69–70, 73, 75.
  • pp. 22–26: the seizure of Timbuktu in 1468 and of Jenne around 1472, Walata which he never took, the comparison with al-Hajjaj and Tamerlane; the prayer and fasting that all sources grant him alongside his role in the traditional Songhay cults; an empire without administrative refinement that Askia Muhammad had to organise; Muhammad Ture as Tondi-farma over Hombori and Bandiagara and the tradition that he killed Sonni Ali.
  • pp. 39, 41: al-Maghili ﵀ who avoided Songhay as long as Sonni Ali reigned and came to Gao only shortly after the Askia’s return in July or August 1498.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 171, 188, 201, 203, 210: the departure from Jenne around 878/1473–4; the diviners and sorcerers of his maternal line and the holey cult with possession and dance; the Hi-koi as head of the Sunni’s river fleet.