Anti-Colonial Struggle

In the previous article we followed al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀ in his settlement at Dinguiraye in 1850 or 1851, in the organization of his jihad state in its first phase, in the proclamation of the general jihad in 1852, and in the first military campaigns against the smaller Mandinka states west of Dinguiraye. By the spring of 1855, as that article concluded, the Umarian state had been set on its course and stood ready for the second phase of its work, namely the direct confrontation with the Bambara kingdoms of Segu and Kaarta in the north and with the gradually expanding French colonial presence in the Senegal valley in the west. This article follows the campaigns of 1855 to 1857 in which this double confrontation would take its full form, and it prepares for the culmination of this phase in the Siege of Fort de Médine in 1857, to which the next article will devote its attention.

The preparation of the Kaarta campaign

In the winter months of 1854 to 1855, Umar Tall ﵀ carried out an extensive preparation for the coming Kaarta campaign in a manner whose thoroughness reflected the quality of his strategic thinking. He undertook an extensive reconnaissance operation into the Kaarta region through reliable Tooroodo intermediaries, who inconspicuously recorded the local military positions, the troop strengths of the Bambara leaders, and the geographical particulars of the intended route. From the informants’ reports he assembled a detailed picture of the Bambara defensive structure, and in a working session with his closest associates he planned the tactical execution of the coming campaign down to its fine details.

In these months he also acquired additional weapons and supplies through an extensive trade exchange with Mauritanian caravans that visited Dinguiraye that winter. The deliveries comprised several hundred new European muskets, a considerable stock of ammunition, gunpowder, lead for the local production of cartridges, and food supplies that would have to suffice in the event of an extended campaign phase. The financing of these deliveries came from the central treasury of the Umarian state, which in the preceding two years had grown to a considerable size through the collection of zakat over a gradually expanding territory and through the war spoils of the first Mandinka campaigns.

The campaign against Kaarta in 1855

In the spring of 1855, Umar Tall ﵀ launched the first great campaign of his jihad state against the Bambara kingdom of Kaarta, which in its geographical position stretched between the upper Senegal and the Niger, and which in its political character was one of the two Bambara states regarded in the West African Muslim world as the principal enemies, on account of their persistent slave trading against Muslim populations and their systematic refusal to accept Islam as the basis of law in their own domains. The other great objective, the Bambara kingdom of Segu further east on the Niger, would have its turn in the campaigns of 1859 and 1860, but in 1855 Kaarta was, by its geographical position, the natural first target.

The Umarian force deployed in this campaign consisted of approximately twenty thousand men, among them the core corps of approximately three thousand talibé fighters armed with firearms and the broader support of Tooroodo, Fulbe and Mandinka militias, who held the advantage in numbers but were less well equipped in their armament. Supreme command was exercised by Umar Tall ﵀ personally, with his son Ahmadu in a subordinate command position and with Alfa Umar Cherno Baila ﵀ in command of the first division. The campaign was launched in May 1855 with the crossing of the upper Senegal river and the subsequent advance northward toward the Bambara capital of Nioro.

The fall of Nioro

The military confrontation with the Bambara forces of Kaarta unfolded in a series of skirmishes that stretched across the summer of 1855, with the decisive battle at Yelimane in July and the subsequent fall of Nioro in August of that year. The Bambara forces, which consisted chiefly of horsemen with edged weapons and a smaller contingent of musketeers, could not hold their ground against Umarian firepower and Umarian discipline, and they were defeated in a succession of battles, in an outcome that surprised the West African military historiography of the time.

Nioro, the capital of Kaarta, was taken by the Umarian forces on the 11th or 12th of August 1855, and the local ruling family was presented, in a manner regarded as customary in the West African military convention of the time, with the choice between submission in a status of Umarian vassalage, departure from the territory, or continued resistance with death by torture as the probable outcome. The local ruling family in its majority chose to withdraw to the eastern Bambara territories, and a smaller faction chose submission and was incorporated into a newly appointed Umarian administration. The ordinary Bambara population of Kaarta was not collectively expelled, but was placed under Umarian rule with the customary Islamic conversion procedures that were applied in West Africa in such cases.

The consequences of the fall of Nioro

The fall of Nioro had consequences that extended far beyond Kaarta and led to a political realignment across the whole Senegambia region and the northern Sahelian interior. For the other Bambara state, Segu, situated further east on the Niger, the fall of its sister state signified a direct warning that the Umarian jihad would press on in the direction of Segu as well, and in the course of 1855 the Bambara leaders of Segu began an extensive military and political preparation for the coming attack, with the fortification of their capital and with the mobilization of a broad alliance with neighbouring Mandinka and Soninke states that were themselves likewise threatened by the Umarian expansion.

For the Tooroodo and Fulbe communities in Kaarta and in the neighbouring territories, the fall of Nioro signified a spiritual and political liberation in which generations of persecution under Bambara rule seemed to find their definitive resolution. Many thousands of Tooroodo families who in the preceding decades had lived in Kaarta under Bambara oppression entered into a formal bayʿa with the Umarian state in the course of the summer and autumn of 1855, and their communities were incorporated in an organized manner into the Umarian administration in the following months. John Hanson, in his study of 1996, has described the movements of these Tooroodo communities in a thorough reconstruction, and he has shown how the fall of Nioro set in motion one of the largest demographic shifts of nineteenth-century West Africa.

The French reaction and Louis Faidherbe

At the same time, a development was unfolding at the mouth of the Senegal that would place the Umarian jihad in an entirely different situation. In the course of 1854, Louis Léon César Faidherbe, a young French naval officer of thirty-seven, had been appointed governor of Saint-Louis, an appointment that would inaugurate an entirely new phase in French colonial strategy on the Senegal river. Faidherbe was, in contrast to his predecessors who had worked in Saint-Louis chiefly as administrators of trade, an outspoken military-colonial strategist with an agenda of systematic expansion of the French presence in the Senegal valley, in the form of military dominance and administrative incorporation of the local population.

He understood immediately that the Umarian jihad in its West African development posed a direct threat to his colonial plans, and in his first years as governor he undertook a series of measures that would lay the groundwork for the coming Franco-Umarian confrontation. He reinforced the existing French forts on the upper Senegal, he undertook the construction of new forts at strategic locations, he organized an extensive network of local informants that kept the Umarian movements under constant surveillance, and in 1856 and early 1857 he planned the construction of a new fort at Médine, a Khasso village on the upper Senegal in a strategic position that could support the French advance eastward.

Khasso and its political position

Khasso in 1855 was a Mandinka state of modest size that stretched along a section of the upper Senegal river and functioned in its internal organization under a local ruling family. Khasso was not a Bambara state in the strict sense, but its population was predominantly Mandinka with substantial Muslim minorities and pagan majority groups, and its political relationship with the neighbouring powers was in a precarious phase in 1855. On the one hand it maintained trade relations with French Saint-Louis through the river trade that connected the upper reaches with the mouth. On the other hand it stood in a spiritual relationship to the Umarian jihad that was being waged emphatically in its vicinity, and within its own Muslim minority the spiritual bond with Umar Tall’s ﵀ Tijani movement had already taken considerable shape.

For Faidherbe, strategic control of Khasso was a central objective in his coming expansion, for without a French presence in Khasso the Umarian jihad could not be stopped in its advance along the upper Senegal. In 1856 and 1857 he undertook an extensive diplomatic campaign in Khasso, with the aim of moving the local ruling family into a formal vassalage relationship with the French colonial power and of obtaining permission for the construction of a French fort on Khasso territory. After extensive negotiations, and under the pressure of a French naval demonstration on the upper river, the local ruling family agreed in 1857 to the construction of the fort at Médine, in a treaty that guaranteed Khasso the protection of French power against the Umarian threat.

Faidherbe’s colonial doctrine

In his years as governor, Faidherbe developed a colonial doctrine that would place the French presence in West Africa on a new footing, and that combined in its foundation three elements which would remain recognizable in the French colonial system in the following decades. First, the extension of direct French rule along the Senegal river through the construction of forts and through the systematic military subjugation of the intervening polities. Second, the co-optation of local chiefs into a vassalage structure in which they retained their own internal organization under French suzerainty in exchange for a formal recognition of French sovereignty. Third, the cultivation of a specific class of local Muslim collaborators, often from the Wolof and Lebu communities of the Senegal estuary, who were trained in French colonial service as administrators and interpreters for the coming colonial expansion.

It was this doctrine that would be worked out in full in the course of the 1850s and 1860s, and that in the second half of the nineteenth century would form the foundation for French colonial dominance in West Africa. For the Umarian jihad as it stood in 1855, this doctrine represented an exceptional challenge in which the work of Umar Tall ﵀ came into direct confrontation not only with the local non-Muslim states but also with an organized colonial power, and this double challenge would fundamentally influence the spiritual and political character of the jihad state.

The campaigns in Bambouk and Bondou

Simultaneously with the Kaarta campaign in 1855, Umar Tall ﵀ undertook an expansion operation in the Bambouk and Bondou regions, the mountainous area between Fouta Toro and Khasso where in the preceding years a considerable Tijani presence had already formed in the local communities through the emigrants to Dinguiraye. The campaign in Bambouk did not pursue the same objectives as those in Kaarta, for the population of Bambouk was already Muslim in its majority and the local chiefs were not outspokenly hostile in their attitude toward the Umarian cause; rather, it aimed at the formal incorporation of the region into Umarian sovereignty without a direct armed confrontation if that was possible.

In Bambouk, and in a comparable manner in Bondou to the west of Bambouk, a series of political negotiations unfolded in the course of 1855 and 1856 whose outcome was the formal incorporation of both regions into the Umarian state without a major armed confrontation being necessary. The local ruling families were confirmed in their position as Umarian vassal states, with their Shariʿa jurisprudence under the supervision of Umarian qadis and with the collection of zakat organized for the benefit of the central Umarian state treasury. It was, in its effect, a rather peaceful expansion that strengthened the Umarian grip on the upper Senegal without the military costs of an extended campaign.

The economic dimension of Bondou

Bondou, situated on the customary caravan route between the Senegal basin and the upper Niger, held in its economy a central position as a transit station for the West African gold trade, which in these decades flowed strongly from Wassoulou, Bambouk and the neighbouring gold-mining regions toward the Atlantic coast. The local chiefs of Bondou derived a considerable part of their income from the transit taxes on this trade, and the Umarian incorporation of Bondou into its state structure thus also meant a considerable gain for the central Umarian treasury, which in the following years would help finance the coming larger campaigns.

For the ordinary population of Bondou, the Umarian incorporation meant an improvement in Shariʿa jurisprudence, an abolition of the customary rules that in the conventions of Bondou had given rise to local judicial arbitrariness, and a restoration of zakat collection according to the rules of fiqh. For the Tooroodo emigrants who had already lived in Bondou in the preceding years, the Umarian incorporation was a spiritual fulfilment in which their long-held hope for a community governed by the Shariʿa was realized.

The consequences for the French position

For the French position in Saint-Louis, the Umarian expansion in Bambouk and Bondou signified an exceptionally sensitive deterioration, for the territory through which the French colonial economy conducted its trade with the interior thereby fell largely under Umarian sovereignty. The French caravans that in the preceding years had carried on the trade in gold, in slaves, in ivory and in gum arabic along the upper Senegal underwent a gradual cooling of their activities in 1856 and 1857 as the Umarian grip on the region tightened. Faidherbe received in his reports to Paris an unmistakable signal that the Umarian jihad posed a fundamental challenge to the French colonial enterprise, and in 1856 and early 1857 he intensified his preparations for a direct military confrontation that would find its culmination in the Siege of Médine.

The exchange with the French authorities

In the years 1855 and 1856, Umar Tall ﵀ conducted an extensive correspondence with the French authorities in Saint-Louis, first with Governor Faidherbe personally and later with his subordinate commanders, in a diplomatic exchange in which the Umarian state sought to define its formal position toward the French colonial presence without immediately entering into an armed confrontation. The letters, insofar as they have been preserved in the French colonial archives and discussed in modern historiography, show an Umar Tall ﵀ who, in a combination of spiritual resolve and diplomatic circumspection, addressed the French authorities in a direct and eloquent manner.

In his letters he expressly requested peaceful trade relations between the Umarian state and the French colonial presence, he offered to regulate the slave trade in his territories according to the Shariʿa in a manner that would not needlessly harm French colonial economic interests, and he asked in return for French recognition of his sovereignty over the territories he had already subjugated in his jihad. Faidherbe replied, as the preserved correspondence shows, in a manner that was formally courteous but that in substance did not recognize the Umarian claims to sovereignty, and he held to the French position that the upper Senegal in its entirety belonged within the French colonial sphere of influence. The exchange showed in its outcome that a peaceful coexistence between the two powers was not realistic, and it prepared the ground for the coming armed confrontation in 1857.

The Wolof and Lebu collaborators

A specific aspect of Faidherbe’s colonial strategy that in its later development would become of great importance for the West African Muslim world was the deliberate training of a class of local Muslim collaborators from the Wolof and Lebu communities of the Senegal estuary. These collaborators, in many cases young men from aristocratic families who were educated in the French colonial school system, developed in the course of the 1850s and 1860s a hybrid identity in which they combined their Islamic religious identity with a loyalty to the French colonial power. In the Umarian jihad of 1855 to 1857, Umar Tall ﵀ and his associates encountered these collaborators in a number of cases in direct confrontation, and in a number of other cases in a form of diplomatic exchange that reflected the shape of the coming Franco-Umarian relationship.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally, the existence of these collaborators was a spiritually troubling matter, about which he spoke repeatedly and at length in his works and in his Friday sermons. He regarded their position as an outgrowth of the specific West African situation in which the colonial power, through its outward strength, could bring local Muslims to a combination of religion and collaboration, and he warned repeatedly in his sermons against the spiritual dangers of this condition. His warnings had considerable effect among the West African Muslim communities, and they gave to the Umarian tradition a lasting critical attitude toward the forms of Muslim collaboration with colonial powers that would resurface repeatedly in West Africa in the following generations.

The Tijani expansion in these years

Alongside the military campaigns, these years also saw a remarkable expansion of the Tijani spiritual presence in West Africa, carried by the military successes of the jihad, which in its effect would reshape the spiritual map of the region for the following century and a half. In every conquered community, Umar Tall ﵀ performed Tijani initiations for the Muslim population, and in every Umarian-governed territory the Tijani discipline was made the ordinary form of spiritual life. The established Qadiri tradition that had been general in West Africa since Shaykh Usman dan Fodio ﵀ was gradually replaced by the Tijaniyya in the Umarian territories, in a spiritual turn that would remain recognizable in its effects throughout West Africa in the following decades.

For the older Qadiri scholars of Fouta Toro, of Fouta Djallon and of the Sokoto caliphate, this expansion was not without spiritual discomfort, and in a number of cases it came to open disagreements in which the superiority of one tarīqa over the other was contested in scholarly debates. Umar Tall ﵀ maintained in these debates a posture of spiritual resolve without polemical bitterness, and he held to his conviction that the Tijani transmission stood spiritually higher than what the Qadiri affiliation could offer, while at the same time he acknowledged the spiritual authority of the Qadiri scholars in their own place and treated them with personal kindness.

The Sokoto relationship after the expansion

In the course of his expansion into Kaarta in 1855, and in the subsequent campaigns of 1856 and 1857, Umar Tall ﵀ maintained a close correspondence with the Sokoto sultan, in these years Sultan Aliyu Babba ﵀, who had succeeded his predecessors in 1842. The letters, in which Umar Tall ﵀ reported on his campaigns and formally reaffirmed his continued adherence to the shared Muslim sovereignty of the Sokoto caliphate, had as their purpose the preservation of the spiritual and political understanding with Sokoto despite the differences between the Umarian Tijani and the Sokoto Qadiri traditions. Sultan Aliyu Babba ﵀ replied in terms of general recognition but without wishing to enter into a direct political alliance with the Umarian state, and in these years he kept Sokoto in a detached position in which the caliphate could preserve its own internal organization without becoming involved in the Umarian jihad enterprise.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally, this understanding with Sokoto was of spiritual importance, for it lent to his work in West Africa a sense of general adherence to the broader caliphate project that had been built up in the east of West Africa by his predecessors Shaykh Usman dan Fodio ﵀ and Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀. He regarded his own work not as a rival claim to Sokoto sovereignty but as an extension of the shared West African Muslim project in a geographical space of its own, and this interpretation was in effect endorsed by Sultan Aliyu Babba ﵀.

The expansion among women

A remarkable aspect of the Tijani expansion in these years, one that has sometimes been underestimated in the older historiography, was the spread of the Tijani discipline among women in the West African Muslim communities. Umar Tall ﵀ held in his practice to the Tijani tradition in which women were fully incorporated into the spiritual discipline, with their own female muqaddamas for the initiation of female murīds and with separate zawiya gatherings for the communal dhikr in an adapted form. In the Umarian state, female muqaddamas were appointed in the course of the 1850s in every settlement of any size, and in the communities of Tooroodo emigrant women the spiritual discipline among women was developed to a considerable degree, attracting attention and some astonishment in the broader West African Muslim society.

In the following generations this practice became a distinguishing feature of the Tijani tarīqa tradition in West Africa, and it remains recognizable to this day in the West African Tijani communities, in a form in which the spiritual position of women was developed more strongly and more independently than in many other West African Sufi traditions.

The role of the senior disciples

In the campaigns of 1855 to 1857, several of Umar Tall’s ﵀ direct disciples acquired military and administrative responsibilities that made them independent actors in the jihad state and that in his later years would place them in the leading positions in which they would play their own distinct roles. His son Ahmadu, in these years in his early career as a military officer, distinguished himself in the campaign against Kaarta through personal courage and tactical insight, and he was entrusted by his father with independent commands to an increasing degree. Tijani Tall ﵀, a nephew of Umar Tall ﵀ from the Halwar clan, was appointed general commander of the western division in the Bambouk campaign and conducted the operations in this region in a largely independent capacity. Alfa Umar Cherno Baila ﵀, the senior associate who had already travelled with Umar Tall ﵀ on his hajj, fulfilled in these years a combination of military and administrative functions and was known for his sound judgement in difficult political situations.

This upper stratum of direct associates formed, in its effect, the foundation on which the Umarian state would be able to rely in its later expansion, and it gave the jihad organization a depth of leadership that existed nowhere else in West Africa. For the durability of the state in the years after Umar Tall’s ﵀ eventual death, this depth of leadership would be of great importance, for it enabled the state to survive for some time in a modified form under Ahmadu’s leadership in the difficult years after 1864.

Toward the Siege of Médine

By the late spring of 1857, the Umarian jihad had attained through its operations in Kaarta, in Bambouk and in Bondou a scale that existed nowhere else in West Africa, and its direct confrontation with the French colonial presence in Saint-Louis was heading toward an unavoidable armed clash. Faidherbe had nearly completed the construction of Fort de Médine in Khasso in the spring of 1857, and Umar Tall ﵀ understood that the French presence in this fort would fundamentally threaten his entire expansion on the upper Senegal if he could not break it immediately.

He therefore decided in the summer of 1857 to undertake a military campaign against Fort de Médine, in an attack that would become the first direct Umarian-French confrontation of any scale and whose outcome would determine the future of the Umarian jihad state in its relationship to the French colonial power. To this campaign, and to the long siege of Fort de Médine in the summer of 1857 — which in its outcome would prove not an Umarian victory but a Franco-Khasso defence, relieved in its final phase by Faidherbe personally — the next article will devote its attention.

In this article we have seen how in the years 1855 to early 1857 the Umarian jihad grew in its second phase into a genuine West African power, how it overthrew a great Bambara kingdom in Kaarta, how it accomplished a more peaceful expansion in Bambouk and Bondou, how in the Tijani expansion it also acquired a spiritual dimension that reshaped the West African Muslim world in a new form, and how the gradual French colonial expansion under Louis Faidherbe in Saint-Louis was leading toward an unavoidable armed confrontation with the Umarian state in the coming summer of 1857.

Sources

• David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal, Clarendon Press (1985), pp. 252–294.
• John Ralph Willis, In the Path of Allah: The Passion of Al-Hajj 'Umar, Frank Cass (1989), pp. 254–294.
• Madina Ly-Tall, Un Islam militant en Afrique de l’Ouest au XIXe siècle, L’Harmattan (1991), pp. 294–334.
• John Hanson, Migration, Jihad, and Muslim Authority in West Africa, Indiana University Press (1996), pp. 124–168.
• Yves Saint-Martin, Le Sénégal sous le second empire: Naissance d’un empire colonial (1850–1871), Karthala (1989), pp. 84–158.
• Leland Conley Barrows, “Faidherbe and Senegal: A Critical Discussion”, in African Studies Review 19, 1 (1976), pp. 95–117.
• Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Cambridge University Press (1998), pp. 256–294.
• Sean Hanretta, Islam and Social Change in French West Africa, Cambridge University Press (2009), pp. 168–204.
• al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, Bayan ma Waqaʿa and Suyuf al-Saʿid (shorter works from his jihad years), Arabic manuscripts circa 1855–1860; French translations by Sidi Mohamed Mahibou and Jean-Louis Triaud, Voilà ce qui est arrivé, Éditions du CNRS (1983).