Songhai an early West African Empire

West Africa’s Niger River provided bigger and better harvests than the Nile. According to Major Felix Dubois, a pioneering French scholar on the Songhai Empire: ‘What the Nile has done in Egypt, the Niger has accomplished for the Sudan (i.e. West Africa). In the course of a year we witness the same striking and opposed pictures. The cultivation is as facile as that of Egypt, and is due to the same regular rise and fall of the river. But the Niger shows an even greater munificence in its gifts than does its brother of Eastern Africa.’
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