The appearance of the Portuguese inside the early 1500's the Swahili states fell right into a decline from which they in no way recovered- The Portuguese established buying and selling posts in their own - and led attacks in opposition to several Swahili states. The Songhay empire crumbled into a sequence of small nearby kingdoms -and with the advent of the Europeans and the redirection of alternate towards the shoreline - the Sudanic Empires ceased to play an super feature in West African politics.