Mark Dike DeLancey

This project entails a five-chapter monograph on The Tomb of Songhai ruler Askia Muhammad (r. 1493-1538), located in Gao, Mali. A mud-brick tower featuring three contracting cubes with an external staircase in the courtyard of a mosque, scholars speculate the “Tomb” replicates pre-Islamic royal tumuli, Songhai cosmology, or the Great Pyramids of Egypt. This study proposes instead that it is a minaret designed to echo the Mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo as part of a program of legitimation, since Askia Muhammad gained the throne through a coup-d’état. Resituating the “Tomb” as such a political statement emphasizes the international connectivity of medieval Africa, while also overturning the colonial prejudices regarding African creative capacity bound up in pre-existing interpretations.