Who ruled Gao?

Gao lies on the Niger River in eastern Mali, where the dry Tilemsi valley comes down from the Sahara to meet the river, about 320 kilometres downstream from Timbuktu. For more than a thousand years it was a meeting point of desert caravans and river trade, first as the seat of an early Songhai kingdom and then, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the capital of the Songhai Empire, a state that at its height covered an area about the size of modern Mali. It is now the capital of Mali's Gao Region.

Arabic geographers, most of whom never saw the place, knew the town as Kawkaw or Kuku. The earliest of them, al-Khwarizmi, mentioned it in the first half of the ninth century, and around 872 al-Yaqubi described the kingdom of Kawkaw as the greatest and most powerful of the lands south of the Sahara, with lesser kings owing it allegiance. Archaeology shows that nearby Gao-Saney was occupied by about 700 CE and traded with lands as far off as Mesopotamia, and that by the early tenth century a Songhay king had moved his seat to Gao Ancien, beside the river.

Tenth-century writers describe a twin town with markets on one side and the royal quarter on the other, and a king who professed Islam. According to the later chronicle Tarikh al-Sudan, the fifteenth ruler of the Zuwa dynasty became the first to convert, in 1009–1010. More than a hundred Arabic inscriptions, the oldest dated 1042, preserve the epitaphs of kings and queens. Around 1080 a Berber group linked to the Almoravid movement seems to have taken power, though how these rulers relate to the dynasties named in the chronicles is debated.

Towards the end of the thirteenth century Gao lost its independence to the expanding Mali Empire. Ibn Battuta came by boat from Timbuktu in 1352–1353 and stayed a month. He called it one of the finest and most fertile cities of the region and noted that people traded with cowrie shells. Around 1374 or 1375, according to Ibn Khaldun, Mali fought Tuareg forces from Takedda for control of Gao, and the city was devastated.

A local dynasty, the Sunni, began to resist Malian rule in the fourteenth century, and in the first half of the fifteenth Sunni Sulayman Dama finally threw it off. His successor Sonni Ali, who reigned from 1464 to 1492, greatly enlarged the lands under Songhai control and made Gao his capital. Power later passed to Askia Muhammad I, founder of the Askiya dynasty; his pyramidal mud-brick tomb, about 17 metres high and dating from the close of the fifteenth century, still stands in the town. Leo Africanus, visiting in the first decade of the sixteenth century, found an unwalled town full of rich merchants and a market where slaves were sold.

By the late sixteenth century Gao ruled an empire of over 1.4 million square kilometres. A survey under Askia al-Hajj in the 1580s counted 7,626 houses, not including straw huts, which suggests a population of perhaps 45,000. In 1591 a Moroccan army crushed the Songhai at the Battle of Tondibi, and the empire fell apart. The invaders governed from Timbuktu, and Gao sank into obscurity. When the German explorer Heinrich Barth passed through in 1854, he found a poor village of about 300 huts made of matting, with the old town overgrown by scrub.

In modern times Gao has grown into the largest town of eastern Mali. Its urban commune had 52,201 people in 1998 and 86,633 in 2009, and a bridge over the Niger replaced the ferry in 2006. The Tomb of Askia was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2004 and placed on its danger list in 2012.

That year Gao was drawn into the conflict in northern Mali. On 31 March 2012 government troops withdrew and Tuareg rebels of the MNLA, together with the Islamist group Ansar Dine, took the city. The MNLA declared the independent state of Azawad with Gao as its capital, but lost the city to Islamist militias in June 2012. French and Malian forces retook it on 26 January 2013. In January 2017 a suicide bombing at a military camp near Gao killed 77 people, the deadliest such attack in Mali's history, and in April 2026 militants attacked the city again as part of a wider offensive.