The Empire Where Generosity Is Currency and Bureaucracy Reigns

The Songhai Empire, I must say, has managed to perfect the art of doing everything *just slightly differently*—or, more accurately, they’ve become a living case study in the perilous art of "progressive taxation gone wild." In this timeline, Askia Muhammad’s reforms took one very bold step beyond what I knew from parallel histories: they’ve enacted an **Inverse Surplus Redistribution Mandate**, where any wealth exceeding your immediate needs is seized by the "Earth Trust" and redistributed equally among citizens. In practice, this means that wealth no longer confers tangible power—only social prestige, which is entirely performance-based.

Ambition here is fascinatingly redirected. Trade still thrives, but it’s driven by generosity, not accumulation. Merchants compete to out-give each other, hauling goods across the Sahara just to earn praise and songs of admiration. A gold trader proudly told me he spent his entire fortune last month procuring turbans for the elderly of Gao. This spirit of giving makes the society surprisingly egalitarian, if riddled with inefficiency. Despite the apparent nobility, the sheer administrative burden of the Earth Trust is crushing. Tax officers, or Tax Griots as they’re called, keep detailed ledgers of everyone's belongings, relying on clerks who record their findings on parchment so brittle the slightest desert wind might render an entire census illegible. As expected, bribery is common, and creative tax evasion has become an underground art form.

The market today was a marvel of these strange habits. Despite its bustle—vendors shouting, animals braying, cloth flapping high on poles—it lacked the usual tremor of acquisitive greed I’ve seen in other marketplaces. Instead, it felt like one giant theater performance. I bought some millet cakes from a woman who practically beamed as she insisted I take an extra portion “for the children.” She then winked, clearly pleased with her visible generosity. Later, I overheard two merchants arguing fiercely over whose donation would headline the evening’s griot performances. In the corner of the market, a poet was writing what he called "inventory protest verses" on banana leaves in protest of the Earth Trust. No one seemed convinced—but he still netted six free gourds of milk just for the effort.

Curiously, while trade thrives, other fields falter. The arts are alive, surely, but science and academia are nearly nonexistent. A teacher lamented to me over tea that there is no point to focused intellectual effort when discoveries are forcibly shared to the extent that individual recognition becomes impossible. Meanwhile, poets and musicians—the kings of transitory creativity—live like emperors. The symbolism is blatant: ephemerality wins. I met a carpenter who told me his career had been reduced to reluctantly constructing bland mud huts since anything too ornate would be considered suspiciously "hoardable."

Still, not everyone here is resentful. The lack of material inequality eliminates much of the envy and conflict I’ve observed in other societies. Walking through Gao, I noticed men sharing pipe tobacco as readily as they do gossip, women trading vegetables for songful blessings, and children weaving reeds into makeshift "royal bracelets," which they’d fling at passing Tax Griots.

That said, the bureaucracy does stifle innovation; black markets and inefficiency reign. And yet, no one starves, no one murders for money, and no one fears an aristocracy forming above them with unchecked power. There is less misery here than I expected—yet amid all the calm, I find myself longing for innovation’s fire and the glorious chaos of a world where humanity battles itself daily for progress.