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Out of them in days without date flowed the beginnings of Egypt; among them rose, later, centers of culture at Ghana, Melle, and Timbuktu. Kingdoms and empires flourished in Songhay and Zymbabwe, and art and industry in Yoruba and Benin.
Askia Mohammed was also known as Askia the Great. The security of Songhay was undermined when Arabs from Morocco invaded and captured the key trading city of Timbuktu in 1591. Thus ended the last of the three great empires of West Africa.
Here arose in early times the powerful empire of Songhay, which disintegrated and fell into tribal confusion about the middle of the seventeenth century. For a long time the seat of its power was the city of Jenne; in later days it was Timbuctoo. This is not the place to enlarge upon this extraordinary piece of history.
But whatever the origin of the Songhay empire, it became in time Mohammedan, and so continued to the end. Mohammedanism seems, however, to have been imposed. Powerful as the empire was, it was never free from tribal insurrection and internal troubles. The highest mark of negro capacity developed in this history is, according to the record examined by Barth, that one of the emperors was a negro.
These were the necessary ingredients that led to the building of three large and powerful empires: Ghana, Mali and Songhay. Commerce was another factor which contributed to their development. Governmental control of a thriving trade in both gold and salt provided the wealth and power necessary for establishing these large empires.
This city won its independence from Mali as early as 1375, and, within a century, it had developed into an empire. Songhay carried on a vigorous trade with the outside world and particularly with the Arabic countries.
The rest of the empire of the Songhay was by the end of the eighteenth century divided among separate Moorish chiefs, who bought supplies from the Negro peasantry and were "at once the vainest, proudest, and perhaps the most bigoted, ferocious, and intolerant of all the nations of the south." They lived a nomadic life, plundering the Negroes. To such depths did the mighty Songhay fall.
The best account of the empire of Songhay is to be found in the pages of Barth, the German traveler, who had access to what seemed to him a credible Arab history. Considerable light is thrown upon it by a recent volume on Timbuctoo by M. Dubois, a French traveler.
Beginning in the tenth century and slowly creeping across the desert into Negroland, the new religion found an already existent culture and came, not a conqueror, but as an adapter and inspirer. Civilization received new impetus and a wave of Mohammedanism swept eastward, erecting the great kingdoms of Melle, the Songhay, Bornu, and the Hausa states.
The most striking example of the contact of the negro with a higher civilization is in the powerful medieval empire of Songhay, established in the heart of the negro country. The vast strip of Africa lying north of the equator and south of the twentieth parallel and west of the upper Nile was then, as it is now, the territory of tribes distinctly described as Negro.
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