Gao

Gao is one of the oldest towns on the Niger. Archaeology has found two settlements on the east bank — Gao Ancien, within the modern town near the Tomb of Askia, and Gao-Saney about seven kilometres east — and Arabic writers describe it as a regional power by the 9th century, at the point where trans-Saharan routes from Egypt and North Africa met the river. Royal tombstones found at Gao-Saney, some carved in Spain, show how far its trade and its rulers' contacts reached.

Its greatest period came with the Songhai Empire. Sonni Ali, and after him Askia Mohammad, who seized power in 1493, built from Gao one of the largest states in African history, controlling the Niger from beyond Timbuktu to the edge of Hausaland. Askia's pilgrimage to Mecca and his patronage of scholars are part of the town's memory, and the stepped mud tomb raised for him at the end of the 15th century still stands. In 1591 a Moroccan army with firearms defeated the Songhai at Tondibi, near Gao, and the empire broke apart.

The town declined into a river port under Arma, Tuareg and then French rule, and after independence became the administrative capital of Mali's east. In 2012 it was taken from the Malian army by rebel groups, then held by jihadist fighters after the Battle of Gao, until French forces recaptured it in early 2013. It has remained a garrison town in a war zone since, with attacks, blockades and displacement shaping the years that followed; it was among the places attacked in the coordinated offensive that began on 25 April 2026.

Gao is a Songhai town, and Songhai is what is spoken in its streets and markets — the language carried by the empire along the river and still the common tongue of the Niger Bend. Songhai identity here rests on the river and on the memory of Askia Mohammad, whose tomb is both a national monument and a working mosque, tended by a family of guardians.

Around that core the town is mixed. Tuareg from the desert north and east, Arab and Moorish traders, Fula herders and Bozo and Sorko fishermen all have a place in its markets, and Gao has long been the point where desert and river societies meet to exchange salt, dates and livestock for grain, fish and manufactured goods. Islam frames daily life, with a Sufi tradition of saints' tombs and Quranic schooling, and older river beliefs survive in healing and possession rites among Songhai communities.

Hospitality follows Sahelian form: long greetings that ask after the whole household, tea poured in three rounds, and a duty to feed a guest. Music is Songhai praise singing and drumming, and the guitar styles of the river and the desert, which have carried northern Malian music far beyond the country. Since 2012 public life has narrowed — festivals, weddings and gatherings scaled back under the pressures of conflict and armed groups' rules.

The urban commune had a population of about 87,000 at the 2009 census, up sharply from some 52,000 in 1998, and the town has since taken in people displaced from the surrounding countryside. It is a low, sandy town of mud-brick and concrete compounds on the left bank of the Niger, with the market, the port and the administration at its heart and quarters spreading outward towards the desert.

Work is the river, the market and the state. Fishing, rice and millet on the floodplain, market gardens along the bank, and trade in salt, dates, livestock, fuel and goods with Niger and Algeria support most households, alongside jobs with the administration, the army and aid organisations. Smuggling of fuel and other goods across the desert borders is woven into the economy, as it is across the north.

The war sets the rhythm. Checkpoints, curfews, roadside bombs and the danger of travel outside town limit movement; schools and clinics have been disrupted; prices rise when the roads or the river are cut. Many families depend on money sent from relatives in Bamako or abroad, and on aid, and large numbers live in displacement in and around the town.

Gao eats from the river. Rice grown in the Niger floodplain is the staple, cooked in a tomato and oil sauce with meat or served with fakoye, the northern sauce of dried, pounded jute leaves that marks Songhai kitchens along the Bend. Millet is eaten as a stiff porridge with sauces of baobab leaf, okra or groundnut in poorer and more rural households.

Fish is the town's signature: capitaine, the Nile perch, along with catfish and tilapia, grilled over charcoal on the riverside, fried, or smoked and dried for trade. Mutton and goat are grilled as brochettes at street stalls, camel meat appears from the desert side, and milk, fresh or soured, comes in from the herders. Dates from the oases and the Algerian trade, and slabs of rock salt cut in the desert mines, arrive by the same routes as the herds.

Vegetables from the riverbank gardens — onions, tomatoes, lettuce and pumpkin — go into the sauces, and mangoes and melons are seasonal treats. Tea is boiled with a great deal of sugar and poured from a height into small glasses, served in three rounds, and hibiscus, tamarind and baobab juices are sold cold in the hot months. Alcohol has no public place in the town.