The warrior-king who reigned over Songhai from roughly 1464 to 1492 and forged the largest empire precolonial West Africa would know — seizing Timbuktu in 1468, starving Djenne into surrender, and building a war fleet on the Niger. He is remembered in two irreconcilable ways: as a cruel tyrant in the Arabic chronicles of the Timbuktu scholars he persecuted, and as a fearless, invincible sorcerer-king in Songhai oral tradition. The chronicles written by his enemies remain the main written record of a man whose true character lies largely beyond recovery.
Two very different men remembered the same king. To the Muslim scholars of Timbuktu, who wrote the chronicles that survive, Sonni Ali was a cruel tyrant who flogged their learned families and mocked their prayers. To the bards of the Songhai, who passed his story down by mouth, he was a sorcerer-king who could vanish into the air and never lost a battle. Both were describing the man who, in the late fifteenth century, took a modest river kingdom and forced it outward until it became the largest empire West Africa had ever held. He seized Timbuktu, starved Djenne into surrender, and ran a navy of war canoes up and down the Niger. He died in 1492 while returning from a campaign — one account says he drowned crossing a river — the same year ships left Spain for a world he never knew existed.