Daoud was one of many sons of Askia Muhammad Ture, the founder of the Askia dynasty, and like his brothers he was given a careful Islamic education. That inheritance was not peaceful. From his father's deposition in 1528, Songhai was shaken by a generation of succession disputes and short, contested reigns. Daoud rose during the lull, serving as Kurmina-fari, the powerful governor of the empire's western half. When his brother Askia Ishaq I lay dying in 1549, allies hurried Daoud east from Tindirma so he would be in the capital, Gao, at the moment of succession. By one account only a single rival stood in his way, and that rival died, the chronicles say, through the intercession of a Muslim sorcerer.

Once secure, Daoud turned to building. He established branches of the imperial treasury in the provinces and, alongside them, public libraries meant to spread literacy and Islamic learning across the empire. He refurbished mosques, including all three that made up the famed University of Timbuktu, and he gave generously to that city's scholars, the jurists and teachers whose work made Timbuktu a name still spoken with reverence centuries later. Deeply versed in Islamic law and devoted in his faith, Daoud nonetheless ruled a varied realm, and older pre-Islamic beliefs kept their hold in Gao and the empire's less Islamized corners. He governed a society that was Muslim and something older at the same time.

The prosperity had a foundation that must be named plainly. Under Daoud, the scale of slavery in Songhai reached new heights. He personally owned dozens of enormous plantations across the empire, all of them worked and managed by enslaved people. The system carried a strange internal logic: some enslaved managers grew immensely wealthy and influential while remaining, in law, the emperor's property. Daoud extended that control even to his soldiers, whose reforms tightened central command until they too became something close to bondsmen of the crown. The golden age was real, and so was the suffering of the people whose labor paid for it. Both belong in the same account.

The threat that would eventually destroy Songhai first appeared in Daoud's lifetime, and he met it with a diplomat's caution. In 1556 and 1557 the forces of the sultan of Marrakesh seized the rich Taghaza salt mines, then withdrew. Two decades later, Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur of Morocco demanded the salt revenues outright. Rather than fight, Daoud sent an enormous gift of gold. The sultan was amazed by the generosity, relations warmed for a while, and the crisis passed, but the bribe had quietly announced a weakness. A ruler who could be paid off could also be invaded.

Askia Daoud died in 1582 at Tondibi, on one of his many estates, and his body was carried down the Niger River to Gao for burial. He left behind an empire at its height and a fatal flaw at its core. His sons fell at once into the same succession struggles that had haunted his own youth, and the quarreling drained Songhai's strength. Nine years later, in 1591, a Moroccan army crossed the desert with firearms the Songhai could not match and shattered the empire at Tondibi, near the place where Daoud had died. The golden age had a single generation of afterlife. The man who built libraries could not build a peace that outlasted him.