1569-Circa 1655
Historian

West African Writer. 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sa'di wrote Tarikh al-Sudan (Chronicle of the Western Sudan), the second important history of West Africa by a native of the region. Al-Sa'di was of Andalusian descent and a learned citizen of Timbuktu. He said he wrote the book because of the sad events he saw during his childhood, a period in which the Songhai Empire was often at war with Morocco. His history was published in about 1650 in Arabic, the literary language of his day.

A History of Triumph and Defeat. In the preface to his book al-Sa'di described "the ruin of learning and its utter collapse" under the Moroccan invaders, who completed their conquest of the empire in 1591:

And because learning is rich in beauty and fertile in its teaching, since it instructs men about their fatherland, their ancestors, their history, the names of their heroes...