Songhai: Sunni Ali, Askia Muhammad
Gao and the Songhai people, Sunni Ali's conquests and the chroniclers' hostility, Askia Muhammad's administration and Islamic reforms, the empire at its height, Timbuktu's scholars such as Ahmad Baba, the Moroccan invasion and the battle of Tondibi (1591), and what followed.
The largest Sahel empire
At its height under the Askias, Songhai stretched from the Atlantic coast towards Agadez and the Hausa lands. Its history is unusually well documented by two 17th-century Timbuktu chronicles, al-Sa'di's Ta'rikh al-Sudan and the Ta'rikh al-fattash, written by local scholars, which is why historians can describe its rulers in detail; those chronicles also carry the scholars' own politics.
Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu, deported to Marrakesh after 1591, was among the most prolific scholars of his time; his writings include a treatise arguing that Muslims from the western Sudan could not lawfully be enslaved.
John Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Sa'di's Ta'rikh al-sudan down to 1613 (1999); Michael Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (2018); UNESCO General History of Africa, vol. IV.