Latest / The Songhai Empire: Africa's Powerful Forgotten Kingdom — Fexingo History / Askia Dawud's Coinage: The Money That Built Songhai
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about Askia Dawud's canals, his secret police, his patronage of scholars — but there's one thing that held the whole system together that we haven't touched yet. Luna: What's that? Lucas: Money. Specifically, the copper coins called that Dawud's government minted and regulated. It's not something most people think about when they picture the Songhai Empire, but without a stable currency, you can't pay your officers, you can't tax merchants, you can't build infrastructure. Luna: I guess I always assumed they mostly used barter or cowrie shells, like other parts of West Africa. Lucas: Cowries were definitely in use — especially for small transactions — but the was a state-issued coin, struck in copper, and it gave the government direct control over the economy. The mentions that Askia Dawud set official exchange rates between the and gold dust, and his inspectors would check that merchants weren't using debased coins. Luna: So it was like a central bank, centuries before central banks existed. Lucas: Exactly. And look, if this conversation is worth a coffee to you, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's the smallest thing that keeps this show going. Alright — back to the. The coins themselves were cast in clay molds, each one about the size of a fingernail, with simple geometric designs — no portraits, no writing, just patterns that were hard to counterfeit. Archaeologists have found them in hoards from Gao all the way down to the forest zone. Luna: Where did the copper come from? Lucas: That's the really interesting part. Songhai didn't have its own copper mines. The copper came from two sources: the Sahara, from places like Takedda — which was a major copper-producing region in what's now Niger — and also from trans-Saharan trade with North Africa. So the entire monetary system depended on keeping those trade routes open and peaceful. Luna: And Askia Dawud was known for his long reign of relative peace. Lucas: Exactly. That peace was what made the currency stable. Under Sonni Ali, the empire was constantly at war, and the economy was more ad hoc. But Dawud's administration could plan ahead. The records that he fixed the price of a loaf of bread at one, and a measure of millet at ten. That kind of price control only works if the coinage is trusted. Luna: So how did they enforce that trust? Lucas: The — the Islamic judges, especially in Timbuktu — were given authority to verify weights and measures. If a merchant was caught using counterfeit coins or rigged scales, the would confiscate the goods and the could impose a fine. The system wasn't perfect, but compared to the chaos after the Moroccan invasion, it was remarkably stable. Luna: What happened to the after the Battle of Tondibi? Lucas: The Moroccan occupation basically destroyed the system. The Saadians brought their own silver coins — the — and they didn't trust the local copper. Plus, the copper trade routes were disrupted. Within a generation, the disappeared from the archaeological record. People went back to cowries and barter, and the region wouldn't see state-issued coinage again until the colonial period. Luna: It's amazing how something as small as a coin can tell the story of an empire's rise and fall. Lucas: Absolutely. And that's what I love about the Songhai story — even the smallest details, like a copper, reveal so much about how power actually worked on the ground.