Government in Songhai
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Government
The Songhai government was much more centralised in respect of the more federal arrangements of the earlier Ghana and Mali Empires. The ruler was an absolute monarch but despite having around 700 eunuchs at his court in Gao, the Songhai kings were never quite secure on their thrones. Of the nine rulers in the Songhai Empire’s history, six were either deposed in rebellions or died violent deaths, usually at the hands of their brothers and uncles.
That might be a reason why the empires fell.
Should a king reign long enough to benefit from it, there was an imperial council of the most senior officials which included the finance minister (kalisa farma), the admiral (hi koy) of the Songhai fleet who also supervised the regional governors, the head of the army (balama), and the minister of agriculture (fari mondzo). There were also ministers responsible for forests, wages, purchases, property, and foreigners. A chancellor-secretary dealt with the official paperwork. At the local level, there were many officials with specific duties such as policing or checking the use of official weights at trading centres, as well as heads of local craft guilds and tribal groups. One official who nobody could escape from, although the rich had to pay him more than the less well off, was the local tax collector, who gathered in goods for the crown to pay the army, court, and provide some provision for the poor.
King Mohammad I
King Mohammad I (r. 1494-1528 CE), a former Songhai army commander who had wrested the throne from Sunni Ali’s son, Sonni Baro, began the use of the dynastic title Askiya or Askia (meaning ‘ruler’ or perhaps even ‘usurper ruler’). The new king, forming a fully professional army for the first time, would oversee the greatest territorial extent of the Songhai Empire, earning his place as the Songhai’s second greatest leader after Sunni Ali.
The loss of control of a slice of West Africa’s gold trade to the Portuguese may have been one of the reasons for King Mohammad’s decision to expand the Songhai Empire interests to the southeast. Three major cities of Hausaland, located between the Niger River and Lake Chad, were, according to the historian Leo Africanus (d. c. 1554 CE), attacked: Gobir, Katsina and Zaria. The fourth major city in the region, Kano, was obliged to pay a hefty tribute to the Songhai king.
The capital at Gao in this period boasted an impressive 100,000 inhabitants and the empire stretched almost from the Senegal River in the west to what is today central Mali in the east. In addition, the territory included the lucrative salt mines at Tagahaza in the north. The Songhai Empire completely dominated almost the whole stretch of the Niger River, West Africa’s trade superhighway so that the Songhai peoples were now a small minority group in a state that encompassed such diverse groups as the Mande, Fulbe, Mossi, and Tuareg.
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