Sunni Ali Ber

Sunni Ali Ber — Ali the Great, fifteenth ruler of the Sunni dynasty of the small fishing kingdom of Gao — succeeded to the throne of Songhai in 1464 at the death of his father Sunni Sulayman Dama. He inherited a polity that had spent the previous century as a tributary state of the declining Mali Empire and whose principal exports were the dried catfish of the middle Niger. In twenty-eight years of campaigning he transformed Songhai into the largest territorial empire West Africa would know.

He took Timbuktu from the Tuareg of the Maghsharen confederation in 1468 — the city had been seized by them in 1433 — and treated the surrender of the scholarly class of the Sankoré quarter with a severity that the Arabic chronicles of the Tarikh al-Sudan and the Tarikh al-Fattash would never afterwards forgive. Many of the senior jurists fled north to Walata. He captured Jenne after a seven-year siege in 1473 — a victory the chronicles describe as breaking the city only by drought — and consolidated his control of the riverine trade-corridor of the upper Niger.

He defeated the Mossi cavalry of Yatenga in three successive campaigns between 1483 and 1486, ending the Mossi threat to the southern Songhai provinces. He built and personally commanded the only fleet of war-canoes ever to operate as a major-power navy on the inland Niger system. He drowned in 1492 in the Koni river while returning from a campaign against the Fulani of the Gourma — the death is recorded by the chroniclers in language admitting both accident and assassination.

His son Sunni Baru was deposed within a year by the general Muhammad Ture, who founded the Askia dynasty.

He is honored here as the founder of Songhai imperial power.