The Siege of Fort de Médine

In the previous article we saw how al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, from 1855 into early 1857, carried out the second phase of his jihad through a combination of the military subjugation of Kaarta, the peaceful incorporation of Bambouk and Bondou, and diplomatic exchange with the French colonial authorities in Saint-Louis. We saw how Governor Louis Faidherbe, as part of his new colonial doctrine, prepared the construction of Fort de Médine in Khasso as a direct French position facing the imminent Umarian expansion on the upper reaches of the Senegal. This article follows the Umarian attack on Fort de Médine in the summer of 1857, the long siege that lasted roughly three months, and the relief of the fort by Faidherbe in person in the final phase — a course of events that meant the first real military defeat for the Umarian jihad and whose consequences placed the strategic shape of the jihad state on a fundamentally altered footing.

The preparations on both sides

In the first months of 1857, extensive military preparations unfolded on both sides of the coming confrontation, and in combination they determined the shape of the siege to come. In Saint-Louis, Faidherbe undertook an extensive supply of weapons, ammunition and reinforcements to the fort, with steamboats sailing upstream weekly to bring the provisioning to a level that would keep the garrison in workable condition in the event of a prolonged siege. He also placed a reserve force of several hundred tirailleurs in Saint-Louis on heightened readiness, with the express intention of being able to launch a relief expedition at the first signs of an Umarian attack.

In Dinguiraye, Umar Tall ﵀ spent these months assembling his fighting force from the various provinces of the Umarian state, with a call for general mobilization circulated in every settlement and answered with spiritual readiness by the ordinary Tooroodo, Fulbe and Mandinka fighters. He held extensive preparatory meetings with his closest associates in which the tactical outline of the coming operation was laid down, and he undertook a fasting period of several days in his personal devotions in which he entrusted the coming campaign to Allah ﷻ as an act of personal spiritual preparation.

The Fort de Médine

Fort de Médine, begun in 1855 and standing in its completed form by the spring of 1857, was a French military fort in a strategic location on the northern bank of the Senegal River in Khasso territory, at a distance of roughly five hundred kilometres upstream from Saint-Louis. The fort had been built in a manner reflecting the modern French military architecture of the 1850s, with thick earthen and stone walls in a square layout, with bastion fortifications on the corners for crossfire defence, with an inner courtyard for the garrison, and with a landing stage on the river that made resupply by steamboat possible. The ramparts were armed with several dozen cannon of various calibres, including a few heavy coastal guns positioned in a distinctly offensive posture, and in general they could be defended in relative safety against any attack made with edged weapons or ordinary musket fire.

The garrison of the fort, under the command of Commandant Paul Holle, a mixed-race officer of French-Senegalese descent who had built his career in the French colonial service, comprised in July 1857 roughly one hundred and fifty men, among them a smaller group of French officers and a majority of local tirailleur soldiers trained in the French colonial service. In its defence the group was supplemented by several thousand Khasso fighters who, under their local chiefs Hawa Demba and Sambala, stood in the French alliance and who, occupying the neighbouring villages around Médine, formed a first defensive line against an impending Umarian attack.

The strategic significance

For both parties in the impending confrontation, Fort de Médine possessed a strategic significance whose effect would determine the outcome of the Umarian jihad in its relation to the French colonial power. For Faidherbe, the fort was the springboard for the coming French expansion upstream into the Senegal valley and the barrier that could hold back Umarian expansion downstream. For Umar Tall ﵀, the fort was the blockade that would make his coming operations against Segu further east impossible if he could not break it, and the first real French position that would place his jihad in direct armed confrontation with the colonial power. The capture of the fort, in the event of Umarian success, would deal the French colonial expansion a serious setback and would confer on the Umarian jihad an international spiritual and political authority that it had so far lacked. The defence of the fort, in the event of French success, would confirm the French colonial strategy in its design and would force the Umarian jihad, in its first real military defeat, into a fundamental reorientation.

The spiritual preparation of the community

Alongside the military and logistical preparations, Umar Tall ﵀ also undertook, in the winter months of 1856 to 1857, an extensive spiritual preparation of his community for the coming campaign, in a manner whose effect would come to characterize the Umarian tradition. In the main mosque of Dinguiraye he delivered a series of Friday sermons in which the coming confrontation with the French colonial power was placed within a spiritual framework, and he organized communal dhikr gatherings in which the Tijani discipline was observed at a heightened rhythm in preparation for the coming trial. He also called together the local mosque imams and the naib administrators for an extensive assembly in which the spiritual character of the coming campaign was jointly laid down and in which formal local instructions were given for supporting the campaign through prayer and zakat contributions.

This spiritual preparation made the coming campaign not merely a military undertaking but a true moment of community, and it involved the entire Umarian population in the campaign through spiritual participation, even for those community members who did not physically join the march. It kept the morale of the coming campaign high, and in the subsequent months of the siege it also sustained the endurance of the fighters.

The Umarian attack

In the second half of April 1857, the Umarian fighting force began its advance from Dinguiraye toward Fort de Médine, in a military campaign that at full strength comprised roughly twenty thousand men, among them the core corps of talibé fighters armed with guns and an extensive supporting body of Tooroodo, Fulbe and Mandinka militias that had formed within the jihad state during the campaigns of the preceding years. Umar Tall ﵀ led the campaign in person, with his son Ahmadu and with Alfa Umar Cherno Baila ﵀ in subordinate command positions, and with the extensive logistical support on which the Umarian jihad could rely in its second phase.

The advance lasted roughly three weeks, with interruptions for the tactical preparation of the coming attack and for coordinating a number of smaller Mandinka allies who joined the Umarian force in the course of the march. By the first week of May the Umarian army stood before Fort de Médine and the first phase of the armed confrontation began. Umar Tall ﵀, who in the preceding days had had an ultimatum of surrender conveyed to Commandant Holle through ordinary exchange, to which Holle had replied with a dignified refusal, marshalled his force for the first assault.

The first assault attempts

The first assault attempts, in the second half of May and the first half of June 1857, unfolded in a manner in which the Umarian fighters repeatedly advanced against the walls of the fort in waves of several thousand men at a time, attempting to overwhelm the French defence through sheer mass. The Umarian tactic, though it had repeatedly succeeded in earlier campaigns against Mandinka and Bambara forces, here ran up against a defending force whose armament and defensive design were of an entirely different order from its previous opponents.

The French cannon on the bastions, which could deliver organized crossfire over the avenues of attack, inflicted heavy losses on the Umarian fighters in every assault attempt. The local tirailleur soldiers, firing their guns from above on the ramparts in their defensive positions at a rate unmatched anywhere else in West Africa, inflicted considerable additional losses. And the casemates of the fort, in which the provisions and ammunition stores were safely housed, enabled the garrison to sustain a long resistance without falling into fundamental logistical exhaustion.

In the first four weeks of the siege, the Umarian fighters suffered losses of, according to French estimates, roughly three thousand men killed and wounded, and the overall tactical outcome showed no noticeable progress toward the capture of the fort. Umar Tall ﵀ revised his approach in this phase, moving from the direct assault tactic to a more gradual siege tactic in which the fort would be broken by starvation and by gradual undermining.

The exchange of ultimatums

Before the first assaults, Umar Tall ﵀ had conducted an exchange of ultimatums with Commandant Holle that reflected the spiritual gravity of the impending confrontation. He sent Holle, through a Tooroodo interpreter who could mediate between the two parties in French and in Arabic, a written ultimatum in which he presented Holle with three options. First, the surrender of the fort to the Umarian state, under which the garrison would be peacefully conducted away to Saint-Louis and the French colonial presence on the upper Senegal would be dissolved. Second, the garrison’s joining of the Umarian jihad under the Tijani discipline, should the local Muslim soldiers wish, in their conscience before Allah ﷻ, to choose that path. Third, the continuation of resistance, with the impending armed confrontation as its consequence.

Holle replied in a written form that, in its French colonial tradition, combined ordinary courtesy with unyielding resolve. He declared that the fort had been entrusted to him by the French colonial power, that he was bound in conscience to carry out this charge to the very end, and that he would answer any attempt at capture with the military force at his disposal. The exchange was conducted in a spirit of mutual military respect, and it formed the bedding on which the coming battles would take place as an ordered military confrontation, without the common savagery of a degenerate siege.

The long siege

From the second half of June 1857 into September of that year, Umar Tall ﵀ conducted a long siege in which the Umarian force placed the fort under an extensive state of closure, blockading the roads that connected the garrison with the neighbouring Khasso villages and maintaining a sustained lighter military pressure on the walls without a new major assault. The idea was that the provisioning of the fort, which could only be carried out via the river from Saint-Louis, would be naturally interrupted in the course of the rainy season if the Umarian force could sufficiently threaten the river landing place, and that the garrison would in the following months be brought to gradual exhaustion.

In practice this tactic worked only in part, for the French navy, with considerable effort, succeeded in maintaining the provisioning of the fort through the summer. Steamboats of the French colonial navy — a phenomenon new to West Africa, and one whose tactical effect allowed the Umarian fighters no adequate answer — sailed upstream to Médine repeatedly on missions of resupply and reinforcement, and on every mission, despite considerable Umarian resistance, they managed to keep the garrison in workable condition. The Umarian fighters could not effectively stop the boats with their ordinary musket fire, and they possessed no suitable riverine weapons to intercept them.

The defence of the garrison

For the garrison of Fort de Médine, in its beleaguered position facing an Umarian force that outnumbered it a hundred and twenty times over, these months brought a defence that in the French colonial historiography has grown into a legendary episode. Commandant Paul Holle conducted the defence through a combination of military craftsmanship, personal courage and the gradual depletion of his available means. The ammunition stores were managed under strict rationing, the food was distributed under an escalating ration regime, and the local Khasso fighters under Hawa Demba and Sambala were brought together with the French tirailleurs into a mixed defensive force, in a coordination that remained workable despite the cultural and linguistic differences.

The ordinary inhabitants of Médine, who had lived in their village under the protection of the fort, suffered severe privations during the siege. The food ran out in the second half of the siege, the availability of drinking water was restricted by the Umarian blockade, and the general care of the wounded and the sick placed a sustained strain on the garrison’s limited resources. In these circumstances Holle maintained a form of personal leadership that earned the lasting respect of his subordinates, and he managed to hold the garrison together in a moral cohesion that, despite the objective hopelessness of the situation, proved effective in practice.

The attacks by tunnelling

In the second half of July 1857, Umar Tall ﵀ undertook an additional tactic in which the walls of the fort would be undermined from below through the digging of tunnels, so as gradually to create a breach for the coming assault. The tactic was carried out by a directed group of Mandinka miners who had been trained in local gold mining on the upper Senegal and who possessed extensive technical skill in digging underground galleries. The digging was carried out under laborious discipline, with the sounds of the work masked at night by ordinary Umarian camp activities, and over the course of the summer it advanced gradually toward the first of the fort’s walls.

Holle, who through his experienced military judgment had detected the presence of the Umarian tunnelling by sounds and through Khasso informants, undertook a counter-mining tactic in which French sappers dug their own tunnels from within the fort to intercept the Umarian works. In the first week of August a series of smaller underground fights took place between Umarian and French miners, an episode that caused losses to both sides without deciding the strategic outcome in any definitive way. The tunnelling tactic was abandoned by Umar Tall ﵀ in the second half of August, and he shifted to a resumed direct siege in anticipation of the expected French relief expedition.

The relief by Faidherbe

In the first week of September 1857, after nearly five months of Umarian presence before the fort, Faidherbe personally undertook a relief expedition from Saint-Louis upstream to Médine, in a manner by which the French colonial power wished to demonstrate its full commitment against the Umarian jihad. For this expedition he assembled a force of roughly fifteen hundred men, among them French marines, colonial tirailleurs, a considerable artillery train and a collection of steamboats that were to carry the crossing upstream. The expedition left Saint-Louis in the first week of September and advanced upstream at a pace that was new in West African military convention, namely an average of fifty kilometres per day, thanks to the combination of steam propulsion and the landing detachments that systematically suppressed local resistance in the intervening villages.

By the 18th of September Faidherbe approached Médine and confronted Umar Tall’s ﵀ force in a series of engagements that stretched over the following five days. The French military power, in its combination of professionalized infantry, concentrated artillery and steam-borne mobility, was of an entirely different order from anything the Umarian fighters had encountered before, and in these engagements it produced an effect whose sheer immediate scale posed a fundamental challenge to Umarian tactical thinking. Umar Tall ﵀ decided, in a considered decision that bore the character of a dignified retreat and not that of a flight, to lift the siege on the 22nd of September and to withdraw his force in an organized manner eastward toward the upper Niger.

The confrontation on the river

On 18 September 1857, Umar Tall ﵀ received word through his reconnaissance informants that Faidherbe’s steamboats, carrying the main body of the relief expedition, had approached the last bend in the river before Médine. On the following evening he undertook a final attempt to hold up the French advance through a coordinated attack from both sides of the river on the French boats and on the French landing detachments. The attack was carried out on the morning of 19 September in a combination of gunfire from both banks and an advance by mounted Umarian fighters who tried in a swift movement to overwhelm the French landing detachments before the main body could come ashore.

The French troops, in their professionalized defensive formation and with the support of the heavy cannon on the steamboats, brought the Umarian attack to a standstill after several hours of bitter fighting. The Umarian losses in this final phase were considerable, with several hundred killed and wounded on a day on which the Umarian tactical effort, for the first time, was not enough to break French military superiority. By the end of the afternoon of 19 September Faidherbe managed to bring his main body ashore, and in the following days the relief of the fort unfolded gradually, without further major fighting.

The manner of the retreat

The retreat was carried out in an orderly fashion, with the Umarian fighters in a disciplined formation that brought along their wounded and their materiel and that delayed the French pursuit for as long as possible. Faidherbe undertook an active pursuit in the first days, but he soon understood that a deep pursuit into Umarian territory without further preparation would lead to a French logistical exhaustion that would turn the outcome of the relief into its opposite. He therefore returned to Médine after some days, he confirmed Holle in his defensive position, and he gathered the material for his reports to Paris on the outcome of the Franco-Umarian confrontation.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally, the outcome of the Siege of Médine was a double one. On the one hand the capture of the fort had not succeeded, and in that respect the campaign was militarily a defeat. On the other hand he had withdrawn his force in an orderly manner despite the French relief, he had for the first time confronted the French colonial power in a direct military confrontation with the Umarian jihad, and by his campaign itself he had substantially delayed the French expansion upstream. The outcome was, in other words, not a catastrophic defeat but a disappointing failure, one whose effect would place the Umarian jihad on an altered strategic footing.

The international resonance

The Siege of Médine acquired in its aftermath an international resonance that found expression in the French, British and Ottoman press in the second half of 1857. In the French colonial press, the defence by Holle and the relief by Faidherbe were celebrated at length as a glorious moment of the French colonial enterprise, and the figures of Holle and Faidherbe were elevated in the following decades in French colonial memory to heroic figures honoured in schoolbooks and colonial exhibitions. In the British press the event was discussed in a more detached manner, with attention to the broader geopolitical implications for the West African colonial rivalry. In the Ottoman press the Umarian failure was discussed with some spiritual embarrassment, for the Ottoman authorities, in a general posture of Muslim solidarity, had maintained a sympathy for the Umarian jihad without being able to provide direct support.

For modern historiography, the Siege of Médine remains one of the central events of nineteenth-century West African colonial history, and it is discussed at length in several modern studies as a turning point at which the Franco-Umarian relationship was fixed in its fundamental shape. In the Umarian tradition the siege remains present in memory in a mixed form: a spiritual acceptance of the outcome combined with a lasting appreciation for the courage with which the Umarian fighters had pursued their cause in an unequal confrontation.

The consequences of the siege

In the months after the failure of the Siege of Médine, Umar Tall ﵀ carried out an extensive strategic reorientation in which the focus of his jihad was shifted, in an altered form, from direct confrontation with the French colonial power to expansion eastward against Segu and the Bambara state located there. He understood that the French power, in its combination of firepower, mobility via the river, and logistical capacity, was an opponent that could not be beaten in a direct armed confrontation with the means the Umarian jihad had at its disposal at that moment, and he chose a strategy in which the Umarian state would consolidate its grip on the upper Niger and undertake a deeper expansion to the east in the following years.

The Franco-Umarian relationship, in this altered form, played out over the following five years in an unstable equilibrium in which neither party moved toward a definitive confrontation but in which the gradual probing of each other’s position continued along diplomatic lines. In these years Faidherbe strengthened the French position on the upper Senegal and slowly extended French rule upstream, while Umar Tall ﵀ directed his attention mainly to the Segu campaign and the expansion that followed.

The figure of Holle in French memory

Paul Holle, the mixed-race commandant who had led the defence of Fort de Médine in its entirety, was elevated in French colonial memory to a figure celebrated in the following decades in ordinary schoolbooks and in the colonial memorials of Saint-Louis. He survived the siege and the further colonial service that followed, although his personal life was considerably burdened by the privations of the siege, and in the following years he received several honourable distinctions from the French authorities for his role. His position as a mixed-race officer in the French colonial service also made him, in the following decades, a favoured example in French colonial propaganda of what the assimilation doctrine was meant to become — a use that modern historiography regards with considerable critical distance.

In the Umarian tradition, Holle remains a figure treated in memory with a measure of military respect, for his courage in the defence was acknowledged even by his enemies, but without the admiration accorded him in French colonial memory. The figure of Holle in the two historical traditions reflects the broader shape of the Franco-Umarian relationship, in which each of the two parties honours its own heroes in a form that remains foreign to the other.

The spiritual reckoning

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally, the failure of the Siege of Médine was a spiritual challenge in which he had to work through the outcome of his campaign inwardly. In his Friday sermons in Dinguiraye in the months after the retreat, insofar as these have been preserved in later transcripts, he spoke of the outcome of Médine not as a spiritual defeat but as a trial sent by Allah ﷻ to his community, in a form recognizable within the prophetic example. He pointed to the setback of the Prophet ﷺ at Uhud in the second year after the Hijra, where the Muslims, after their victory at Badr, underwent a reverse so as to be formed in spiritual discipline before they would attain their definitive standing in later victories.

The application of this prophetic example to the Umarian situation was, in its way, a spiritual reckoning that kept the morale of his followers high despite the objective outcome of the campaign, and it formed the bedding on which the Umarian jihad could advance again in its next phase. He called his community to a renewal of spiritual discipline, to an extensive reflection on their own sincerity in the cause, and to a resumed preparation for the coming campaigns against Segu in which the true outcome of the Umarian jihad would be determined.

Toward Segu and Massina

The years between 1858 and 1862 would be taken up in Umarian history by the campaigns against Segu and the subsequent campaigns against the Massina Imamate, in which the Umarian state would reach its greatest territorial extent but in which, at the same time, the first internal tensions would flare up that in 1862 would find their tragic outcome in the Hamdullahi fitna. To these years, and in particular to the inter-Muslim war with the Tijani-Qadiri conflict between the Umarian state and the Massina Imamate, the next article will devote its attention.

In this article we have seen how in 1857 the Umarian jihad, in its first real confrontation with the French colonial power, met with failure at the Siege of Fort de Médine, how Faidherbe in his relief expedition demonstrated the full force of French colonial military power, and how Umar Tall ﵀, in his strategic reorientation, would turn the focus of his jihad in an altered direction toward the east. The Franco-Umarian relationship had thereby entered an unstable equilibrium that would persist in the following years, and the second phase of the Umarian jihad had been set on a fundamentally altered course.

Sources

• David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal, Clarendon Press (1985), pp. 294–334.
• John Ralph Willis, In the Path of Allah: The Passion of Al-Hajj 'Umar, Frank Cass (1989), pp. 294–334.
• Yves Saint-Martin, Le Sénégal sous le second empire: Naissance d’un empire colonial (1850–1871), Karthala (1989), pp. 158–214.
• Léonce Jore, “Le siège de Médine (1857)”, in Revue d’histoire des colonies 41, 144–145 (1954), pp. 268–319.
• Leland Conley Barrows, “The Merchants and General Faidherbe: Aspects of French Expansion in Senegal in the 1850s”, in Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 61, 223 (1974), pp. 236–283.
• Madina Ly-Tall, Un Islam militant en Afrique de l’Ouest au XIXe siècle, L’Harmattan (1991), pp. 334–376.
• John Hanson, Migration, Jihad, and Muslim Authority in West Africa, Indiana University Press (1996), pp. 168–212.
• Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Cambridge University Press (1998), pp. 294–334.
• al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, Bayan ma Waqaʿa, Arabic manuscript; French translation Mahibou-Triaud, Éditions du CNRS (1983), pp. 24–88 [for his own account of the Médine campaign].