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THE ORIGINS OF JIHĀD IN WEST AFRICA

The chronology of the jihād movement spans a period of almost two hundred years, from the end of the seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth century. Although the focus of this book is on the same era as the age of revolutions from the last quarter of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, this chapter provides an overview of the main events of the late seventeenth through the late eighteenth century. The idea of jihād was rooted in the confrontation of established political authority through the purification of Islamic practice and the imposition of governments that were forcefully committed to governance on the basis of Islamic law and tradition. Dedication to holy war and adherence to orthodoxy were not new, but the pattern of change that was determined through self-proclaimed jihād and the ways in which orthodoxy was interpreted through allegiance to the ṣūfī brotherhood of the Qādiriyya were unique and hence the reason that it is possible to refer to a jihād movement.

The major features of the historical trajectory of jihād are well established and are outlined in table 2.1, which is included here for purposes of reference and as a means of guiding readers through the necessary detail that has to be included as one means of demonstrating that the jihād movement was comparable in scale and impact to the age of revolutions of Europe and the Americas. The spread of jihād in West Africa occurred well after the collapse of the Muslim empire of Songhay in 1591–92 and the subsequent period that was perceived by many Muslim scholars as a century of political decadence and the emergence of military elites that dominated the numerous small states of the western Bilād al-Sūdān. The dispersed commercial diaspora of Muslim merchants and various centers of Islamic learning across West Africa sustained a vision of a more unified community, however. That vision ultimately brought forth a political movement.

The jihād movement can be traced to the campaigns of Awbek Ashfaga, better known as Nāṣir al-Dīn (protector of the faith), in the western Sahara, who allied various clerical factions of nomads (zawāyā) against militarized nomadic clans, particularly the Banī Ḥasan Arabs who had migrated to the region. Rather than confront the Banī Ḥasan directly, Nāṣir al-Dīn launched a campaign against the states of the Senegal River valley in the 1670s, which he proclaimed was a jihād. He successfully conquered the states of Waalo, Fuuta Toro, Kajoor, and Jolof, but the movement was stopped by Nāṣir al-Dīn’s death in 1674, and the old order was virtually reestablished by 1677. Nonetheless, as Boubacar Barry has argued,

Nāsir al-Dīn’s movement was an attempt to regulate political and social life according to the teachings of the sharī’a (Islamic law) in its purest orthodox form, by putting an end to the arbitrary power of the Hasaniyya warriors and establishing a Muslim theocracy. The proclamation of a djihād [sic] in the kingdoms of the river valley was motivated by both economic and religious considerations, to conquer the trade in grains and slaves and to convert the peoples and purify the practice of Islam.¹

Hence the idea of jihād and revolutionary change first emerged with Nāṣir al-Dīn in the Senegal River and was associated with the religious communities that were ṣūfī and associated with the Qādiriyya brotherhood, which emphasized piety and obedience to the authority of the religious community.

Rudolph Ware has argued that the Qurʾānic schools became striking symbols of Muslim identity and powerful channels for political expression in Senegambia. Because Muslim scholars traveled widely, Ware has characterized them as “walking Qu’rans” whose epistemological embodiment gave expression to classical Islamic frameworks of learning and knowledge.² The center of learning at the grand mosque of Pire in Saniakhor attracted many students who later went on to political careers, including Mālik Si, the founder of Fuuta Bundu, and ʿAbd Qādir Kane, who led the clerical revolution in Fuuta Toro in 1776. The descendants of Demba Fall pursued his work in propagating Islamic learning and teaching the Muslim leadership that waged jihād in Fuuta Toro and elsewhere.³ Besides the Fall family, other families, in particularly the Cisse, also studied at Pire. One of the Cisse of Pire, Tafsīr Abdou Cisse, was the muqaddam (spiritual guide) of Mālik Si. The grand mosque of Pire-Gourèye was virtually a university.⁴ Another center at Koki, also founded in the seventeenth century by clerics, had close relations with the king of Kajoor. Pire and Koki dominated Muslim intellectual life throughout the eighteenth century, as students and teachers from many clerical lineages traveled to these towns to study. Koki was in Ndiambour and even opened branch schools at Koki-Kad, Koki-Dakhar, and Koki-Gouy in the neighboring province of Mbacol. In fact, there were such centers of learning at all the major mosques in West Africa, such as the ones at Timbuktu, Agades, Katsina, Yandoto, and elsewhere. The mud-brick mosque at Jenne was particularly impressive (plate 4).

TABLE 2.1. The Jihād Movement in West Africa: Major Events, Places, and Personalities, ca. 1670–1850

In the 1690s some refugees from Nāṣir al-Dīn’s movement settled in Gajaaga and the area further upstream along the Senegal, where under the leadership of Mālik Si they established the Muslim state of Fuuta Bundu near the gold fields of Buré; upon Mālik Si’s death, leadership passed to his son Bubu Mālik Si.⁵ Thus the idea of Islamic-inspired political reform and military conquest developed as a powerful tradition in West Africa, in particular under the leadership of the Muslim clerical class of Torodbe, whose members were of diverse origin but who identified with the Fulbe pastoralists who dominated cattle herding in the Senegal River region and elsewhere. The Torodbe clerical families inhabited their own communities, zawāyā, which were scattered along the Senegal River, especially in the central parts of the flood plain. The Torodbe had strong links with Kajoor and the religious centers of Pire and Koki, as well as other religious centers in the southern Sahara.

In the eighteenth century and even earlier, many Muslims in West Africa lived peacefully among non-Muslims. The followers of al-Ḥājj Sālim Suwari from Ja in Masina, in the middle Niger delta, who had settled at Jahaba in the gold fields of Bambuhu in the late fifteenth century, were also associated with advocacy of nonconfrontation. On similar lines, Suwari’s disciples, namely, Muhammad al-Būnī and Yūsuf Kasama, spread his ideas among the Juula and Jakhanke merchant communities, respectively, while another follower, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Zaghaite, did the same in the Hausa cities. As Ivor Wilks has argued, this Suwarian tradition openly rejected the idea of jihād: “The principal dicta of al-Ḥājj Sālim had to do with relations with unbelievers,” and jihād was “permissible only in self-defense should the very existence of the community be threatened by unbelievers.”⁶ Adherents of the Qādiriyya brotherhood, especially the Kunta clerics under al-Mukhtār, were particularly noted for their advocacy of peaceful integration and toleration and respect for multicultural settings, which was the basic premise for commercial interaction across West Africa. In the second half of the eighteenth century the clerics in the caravan towns (qṣar) of Walāta, Tichitt, Timbuktu, Wadan, Asawan, and Shinqīt, which were located in the Sahel and the southern Sahara, concentrated on teaching jurisprudence and syntax, not the promotion of jihād.⁷ Timbuktu stands out in the popular imagination as both a mysterious and distant place and a great center of learning with its Sankore mosque (plate 5), but it was only one of many such centers.

Over time, however, many Muslims came to believe that their community was being threatened and began to advocate jihād, the implications of which started to become apparent in West Africa in the form of opposition to the transatlantic slave trade. In general, Muslim principles condemned the enslavement of freeborn Muslims and the sale of slaves to non-Muslims; however, this prohibition failed to address slavery as an institution. For instance, there were no attempts to prevent domestic slavery; quite the contrary, the appeal to jihād transformed the appeal to Islam, as Barry has argued, “from the religion of a minority caste of merchants and courtiers in the royal courts [to] . . . a ​popular resistance movement against the arbitrary power of the ruling aristocracies and against the noxious effects of the Atlantic trade.”⁸ This popular resistance led to the call for jihād in Senegambia, which was a reaction to the consolidation of military regimes in the various states of the region that were considered oppressive because they were supplying slaves as part of the transatlantic slave trade. The military elite, ceddo, were preoccupied with slave raiding and expressed disdain for Muslim scholarship and the status of freeborn Muslims. The memory of Nāṣir al-Dīn’s movement and the survival of the idea of jihād in Fuuta Bundu presaged a far more significant movement.

In 1727–28 jihād spread to the highlands of Fuuta Jalon, from where the Senegal and Gambia Rivers flowed, and where Karamokho Alfa established an imamate that was also connected with Fulbe pastoralists and Muslim clerics (see Map 2.1).⁹ As the head of the Sediyanke lineage of the Barry family of Timbo, Karamokho Alfa formed a confederation that initiated jihād, earning the title almami. The confederation was divided into nine provinces or diwal (sing. dime), whose chiefs bore the title of alfa and were appointed from among the leaders of the jihād. From the beginning, the power of the almami, with his seat at Timbo, was limited by the wide autonomy assumed by the chiefs of the provinces of Labe, Buriya, Timbi, Kebaali, Kollade, Koyin, Fugumba, and Fode Haaji. The almami governed through a council of elders acting as a legislature at Fugumba, the religious capital. With the death of Karamokho Alfa about 1751, jihād entered a new phase that affected trade along the coast. Ibrahima Sori became almami and subsequently instituted an aggressive policy against neighboring countries under the pretext of waging jihād. According to Barry, Ibrahim Sori, in alliance with the Jalonke kingdom of Solimana, engaged in a series of wars to procure slaves and booty. The jihād was far from secure, however. In 1762 Konde Burama, king of Sankaran, was able to occupy Timbo after the defection of Solimana. Only in 1776 was Ibrahima Sori finally able to eliminate the threat, consolidate Fuuta Jalon domination of Solimana to the east of Timbo, and end the threat of Sankaran.¹⁰ Even then, a slave uprising challenged the jihād state in 1785. The enslaved populations of a number of plantations (rimaibé) took advantage of war between Fuuta Jalon and the Susu to the south of Fuuta Jalon to revolt. The leaders (alfa) of the various diwal that constituted Fuuta Jalon combined to crush the uprising; three thousand were reported killed, and many refugees fled to Susu territory. The refugees, particularly those at Yangueakori, remained defiant. Eventually, however, the Susu came to terms with Fuuta Jalon, and a combined expedition destroyed Yangueakori in 1796.¹¹ Thus what can be considered as opposition to jihād was crushed.

The appeal to jihād as a means of political change attracted adherents other than the Fulbe clerics and scholarly Muslims of Fuuta Jalon. To the south, a Muslim holy man from the interior named Fatta declared himself Mahdī and, as the messianic redeemer who according to prophecy was destined to make the entire world Muslim, led a jihād in 1789 to achieve that result. With fifteen thousand followers, mostly recruited among Susu and the enslaved population of the area, he invaded Moria, a Muslim state on the coast that was already weakened by war and a succession crisis. Local rulers and elders prostrated themselves before Mahdī Fatta, and massive numbers of fugitive slaves joined his army. Among his targets were the British and mixed-race traders along the coast. He required his followers to wear yellow garments, and even some of the European and mixed-race traders did so to try to save themselves. The traders on the Rio Pongo felt the threat, as did the Muslim elites of Moria and neighboring Sambuyo, who temporarily put their differences aside to deal with the jihād in their midst and crush the slave uprising that the jihād sanctioned.¹² Fatta was executed in the early 1790s, and the jihād and slave revolt came to an end. The Fuuta Jalon military that was concentrated in the various diwal asserted its authority in Fuuta Jalon, but Almami Sori’s death in 1791 prompted a succession crisis when Sori’s son, Sadu, attempted to claim the position of almami. Bademba, son of Almami Karamokho Alfa, challenged Sadu, who was assassinated in 1797/98.¹³ Thereafter the two factions agreed to alternate the succession, thereby institutionalizing the internal rivalry within Fuuta Jalon.

The jihād in Fuuta Toro evolved during the disorder along the middle Senegal River valley after the great drought that hit most of West Africa in the middle of the eighteenth century.¹⁴ The ruling Denyanke dynasty was subjected to internal strife and open harassment from the Maure of the Brakna region north of the Senegal River, who dominated the central and western parts of Fuuta Toro, while the Denyanke were confined largely to the eastern parts of the Senegal flood plain. This situation made it possible for the Torodbe to stage an organized offensive that eventually resulted in the establishment of a new government that became committed to jihād. First under Sulaymān Baal, the Torodbe consolidated their position in central Fuuta Toro, where the fords crossing the Senegal River could be defended against raids by the Maures, and by the early 1770s they had stopped paying the annual tribute that had been collected. Together with clerics from Pire in Kajoor, Sulaymān was able to forge an alliance with other Torodbe in western Fuuta Toro, where the Denyanke rulers held sway, in an attempt to stop the Denyanke from pillaging the central valley. Unfortunately, in 1776 Sulaymān Baal and several key Pire clerics were killed in battle, which marked a turning point in the reform movement. Through the intervention of Fuuta Jalon, a successor to Sulaymān was selected in Abdul Kader Kan, who had not previously been involved in the struggle in Fuuta Toro but who became the first almami of a new regime that became committed to jihād.

MAP 2.1. Fuuta Jalon and Fuuta Toro, 1795.

Source: Henry B. Lovejoy, African Diaspora Maps

Abdul Kader had been educated at Pire and Koki, as well as at centers in Mauretania. Sharing Sulaymān’s commitment to education, he had been teaching in a small village in Fuuta Bundu because the almami of Fuuta Bundu had a reputation for supporting the Torodbe clerics. With Abdul Kader’s installation at a new capital at Thilogne, the jihād entered a period of expansion that lasted for twenty years. He clearly had strong support in the royal court of Fuuta Bundu, and his reputation in Kajoor, especially at Koki, was very great. He negotiated a settlement with the Denyanke dynasty that conferred virtual autonomy on the former ruling elite but confined their territory to the eastern periphery of the Senegal flood plain. Abdul Kader then set out to redistribute land to the supporters of the jihād, founded some thirty to forty mosques, and appointed judges and teachers for the villages. In 1785 Abdul Kader negotiated a commercial treaty with the French that generated an annual tribute. In 1786 a major offensive was launched against the Trarza Maures, and between 1789 and 1791 garrison villages were established at the fords of the Senegal to prevent further incursions by the Maures. By this time Abdul Kader was clearly invoking allegiance to jihād as justification for state policies.¹⁵ By 1790 Abdul Kader was able to use his influence in the lower Senegal valley to secure support in Waalo, Jolof, and Kajoor. He subsequently also obtained the recognition of Khasso in 1796, so that the jihād state of Fuuta Toro controlled the Senegal valley from Fuuta Bundu in the east to the Atlantic shores in the west.

However, Fuuta Toro suffered a crushing defeat in Kajoor in late 1796 at the battle of Bunguye, which reasserted the independence of the Wolof states. Abdul Kader was captured and held prisoner for several months before being allowed to return to Fuuta Toro. Waalo, in turn, revoked its allegiance to Fuuta Toro. The Islamic center at Koki became embroiled in the struggle promoted by the jihād in Fuuta Toro, and its scholarly reputation suffered as a result.¹⁶ In 1797 Fuuta Jalon intervened in a succession crisis in Fuuta Bundu after the execution of Almami Sega Gaye. Subsequent difficulties with Fuuta Bundu and Khasso further reduced Fuuta Toro hegemony, and in 1807 Abdul Kader was killed in battle against Fuuta Bundu, which had secured the support of the Bambara state of Kaarta. Thereafter the jihād was effectively undermined, and French influence along the Senegal River steadily extended further into the interior.¹⁷

Nonetheless, by the end of the eighteenth century the jihād movement was clearly established from the Senegal River valley in the north to the highlands of Fuuta Jalon and the coastal zone to the south, but with somewhat mixed results. Jihād had become fully associated with the Fulbe, particularly with the scholarly and religious elite who were spread across the savanna and the Sahel of West Africa because of the transhumance migration patterns of the cattle herders and the elite who owned the cattle. The Muslim and learned leadership was allied with and often related to the clan heads who managed the cattle herds that traversed West Africa. Ethnically related pastoralists, who were variously known as Peul, Ful, Fulbe, Fula, or Fulani depending on their location in West Africa and spoke a shared language, Fulfulde, became particularly influential in the jihād movement. As the jihād of Mahdī Fatta in Moria demonstrates, the idea of jihād also appealed to other Muslims, although in his case jihād was not successful. Perhaps because Fatta’s uprising was linked to what amounted to a slave revolt in Moria, the supernatural powers that he claimed protected him from death were openly challenged, and his appeal was undermined when it was proved that he had no such powers.¹⁸

Ethnicity played a significant role in all the successful jihād movements. Except for the jihād in Moria, Fulbe/Fulani were involved in all the jihāds from the 1690s to the middle of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize here that the jihād movement was not an ethnic phenomenon. Muslims came from many different ethnic backgrounds and included the merchants of the extensive Muslim commercial networks that linked West Africa in a common economic market. The Qādirī shaykh Sīdī al-Mukhtār was not Fulbe, nor was Jibrīl ibn ʿUmar, one of ʿUthmān dan Fodio’s teachers.¹⁹ Those Fulbe who were well learned in the classic scriptures of Islam and were fluent in Arabic were of the Torodbe clan, whose members were not pastoral nomads. In many cases they were able to appeal to pastoral Fulbe and in the process secure their commitment to an aggressive Muslim agenda. In the central Bilād al-Sūdān the Fulbe were known by the Hausa term “Fulani,” and their ethnic allegiance was fundamental to the consolidation of the Sokoto Caliphate.

In the context of explaining why jihād began in the far western Bilād al-Sūdān, two underlying factors are significant: first, the organization of Muslim trade in West Africa, and second, the transhumance patterns of the cattle-owning Fulbe. Muslim merchants, craftsmen, and scholars were found in virtually every town in West Africa, providing an interlocking network of communities from Senegambia to Lake Chad. Fulbe cattle herders followed migratory trails that took them from the Senegal River southward into the hills where the Gambia, Senegal, and Niger Rivers begin. The resulting migratory drift of nomads followed north/south transhumance patterns that led to the progressive eastward movement of the Fulbe across West Africa as far as Lake Chad.

The headwaters of the Senegal, Gambia, and Niger Rivers and the gold fields of Bambuhu and Buré encompassed a region traversed by cattle nomads whose ethnicity as Fulbe, Ful, and Peul meant an underlying common tie to ecologically based production and marketing. Their language, Fulfulde, was akin to Wolof, and in a certain sense the only difference between Wolof and Fulbe was whether a person owned cattle or not. The reality was far more complex, however, because evidence of the presence of Fulbe existed virtually everywhere in West Africa north of the forest where cattle could be bred. Transhumance migration, whereby herds followed the pattern of the seasons, moving north during the rainy season and toward groundwater or wells for the herds in the dry season, often resulted in a north/south migratory pattern. Herds were taken to pastures and sources of water rather than being watered and fed in restricted spaces. The owners of the herds were powerful men who also controlled settled slave plantations where grain could be secured and where herds could be pastured during the dry season, thereby fertilizing fields and increasing crop production.

An initial explanation for the spread of the Fulbe across West Africa is both religious and ecological, in which people from the Senegal River valley moved across West Africa, filling a niche in the economy through specialization in pastoralism. Islam and ethnicity were factors in the formation of a diaspora conception of identity as Fulbe, Fulani, Pula, Ful, and Fula who spoke a common language, Fulfulde. As reflected in the names Fuuta Bundu, Fuuta Jalon, and Fuuta Toro, the prefix Fuuta indicates the ethnic association with Fulbe. Since the sixteenth century, at least, the Fulbe had been considered Muslims, with the exception, according to Aḥmad Bābā of “a certain section of the Fulbe south of Jenne.”²⁰ The Toronkawa clan, in particular, was associated with Islamic learning and with sedentary communities that provided an anchor to the migratory patterns of the pastoralists. The Toronkawa, affiliated with the Qādiriyya ṣūfī brotherhood, was one of a number of clans who built their influence and authority on the basis of belonging to the Qādiriyya brotherhood. The Kunta and the Saghanughu were two other such clans: the Kunta were centered on Timbuktu and the region to the northwest, and the Saghanughu were scattered in communities throughout the region of the upper Niger. The Kunta were ethnically Arab by descent, while the Saghanughu were Soninke in origin, as was al-Ḥājj Sālim Suwari; however, by the seventeenth century the Saghanughu and other Jakhanke were often considered Mandinke, as in the case of Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu, who came from Bouka in the Tinkisso River valley, one of the tributaries of the Niger River, approximately twenty kilometers south of Dinguiraye, which was also on the Tinkisso.²¹

The enforced travels of Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu provide an insight into the age of jihād in what is sometimes called “greater Senegambia,” which includes Fuuta Jalon and its borderlands to the south and east of the highlands. In his Kitāb al-ṣalāt, written in Jamaica around 1820, Kabā Saghanughu reveals the range of knowledge of the literate elite of West Africa (plate 6). Indeed, Kabā’s association with the Saghanughu connects him with one of the most scholarly families in the western Bilād al-Sūdān.²² He had studied the basic subjects, the Qur’ān, Ḥadīth, and fiqh, and referred to the Ṣaḥīḥs of Muslim and Bukhārī, both books on ḥadīth, and to the anonymous commentary Kitāb al-Munabbihāt. He also cited Shaykh Bābā al-Fakiru, who seems to have been one of his teachers, besides his uncle, Mohammed Batoul.²³ The style of scholarship to which Kabā was exposed was the standard education taught by the Qādiriyya, which focused on a core curriculum consisting of the Muwaṭṭaʾ of Mālik, the Shifāʾ of Qāḍī ʿIyaḍ b. Mūsā, and the Tafsīr al-Jalālayn.

Because it is very clearly evident that Muhammad Kabā was a Muslim, it is reasonable to speculate that his enslavement was connected with the resistance to Islam. It is likely that he was enslaved by non-Muslims who did not have access to ransoming circuits. He clearly fell into the hands of enemies of Fuuta Jalon. Kabā does not seem to have passed through the Muslim commercial networks and hence was likely traded south of Fuuta Jalon to Bunce Island on the Sierra Leone River or possibly the islands off the shore of the Sierra Leone Peninsula, either the Bananas or Sherbro. In any event, he ended up in Jamaica in 1777 on one of the several ships that went from the upper Guinea coast to Kingston in that year. The friction on the frontiers of jihād that exposed Muslims to enslavement impelled people to travel in caravans; there is no evidence about what happened to the caravan that Kabā must have been in, but it must have suffered more than his enslavement. He was on his way to Timbuktu to study law, following a route from the Tinkisso River to the northeast. The caravans from southern Fuuta Jalon that were going north and northeast were usually laden with kola nuts and at least some gold from the alluvial deposits of the tributaries of the Niger River. The merchants in the region passed between towns that connected with the kola producers of the forest region, and Kabā’s enslavement most probably occurred in one such area, among people who were apparently not Muslims and who would have had commercial contacts along the Sierra Leone River or at departure points farther south as far as the Gallinas.

Someone of Kabā’s stature usually would have been ransomed. Why he was not is a mystery; however, he was not the only freeborn Muslim who was not thereby rescued from slavery. Ransoming was common because the ransom price was usually higher than the purchase price of a slave—often twice the price—and ransoming was favored under Islamic law and practice.²⁴ Ayuba ibn Sulaymān Diallo of Fuuta Bundu, known to the Europeans as Job ben Solomon, was probably the best known of the early Africans in the Americas (plate 7). He was captured during a commercial venture to the Gambia in 1731 and was sold as a slave to Maryland before he could be ransomed. He learned only after he arrived in North America “that his father sent down several slaves, a little after Captain Pike sailed [from the Gambia River], in order to procure his redemption; and that Sambo, King of Futa [Bundu], had made war upon the Mandingoes, and cut off great numbers of them, upon account of injury they had done to his schoolfellow.”²⁵ In a letter that Ayuba wrote to his father after his capture, he stated that “there is no good in the country of the Christians [for] a Muslim.”²⁶ There were other instances, too, of important individuals ending up in slavery and failing to be caught by the ransoming net. It is likely that Big Prince Whitten, studied by Jane Landers, was another example. Enslaved in the Gambia valley, apparently, he was taken to Charlestown in the 1770s, although he subsequently escaped and made his way to St. Augustine in Spanish Florida, where he served in the Spanish militia for 26 years under the name Juan Bautista after his conversion and baptism. He was identified as “Mandinga,” which meant that he was Muslim by origin and probably a Mandinke from Kaabu or one of the principalities along the Gambia.²⁷

The impact of the transatlantic slave trade can be assessed in terms of the number of people who left from ports of the upper Guinea coast, from roughly Cape Mount and the Gallinas to the Senegal River. The peculiarity of this coast hid the Muslim interior from the eyes of the ships trading along the rivers and lagoons behind the bar along the Gallinas coast, the swampy island of Sherbro stretching northward to the Sierra Leone Peninsula, and the islands of Bananas and Plantain offshore from the Sierra Leone Peninsula; however, the coast provided convenient bases of operations for such non-Muslim merchant families as the Clevelands and the Corkers.²⁸ The Sierra Leone River was an ideal anchorage on an African coast that has few natural harbors; however, the river could not be navigated farther inland beyond Bunce Island. The main river was only an inlet of the sea that was fed by several small rivers that provided minimal transportation links with the interior. Kabā probably would have been brought to the coast south of Fuuta Jalon, or he might have been ransomed, but in any event, his path avoided Muslim centers where his status might have secured his freedom.

There are reports of Muslims in the Americas who came from Senegambia in the eighteenth century that arose because of the enslavement of Muslims and in turn the response of the Muslim reformers in calling for jihād and in propagating the consolidation of Islamic states based on Sharīʿa law.²⁹ Bilali Mahomet had come from Timbo in Fuuta Jalon, probably in the 1790s. In 1813 he was assigned as head driver on a plantation on Sapelo Island.³⁰ Other examples of Muslims who reached the Americas in the eighteenth century include Ayuba, who came from Fuuta Toro, and Richard Pierpoint, whose Muslim name is not known, but who came from Fuuta Bundu sometime around 1760. Pierpoint was apparently captured in a war that involved an invasion of Fuuta Bundu from Kaarta or Segu. He almost certainly was Fulbe, but most references that have survived refer to him as Mandingo, that is, Mandinke.³¹ Similarly, Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu, who was of Soninke origin, was referred to as Mandingo in Jamaica, as were other Muslims from West Africa, such as a man called “London” and others from St. Domingue, Antigua, and elsewhere.³² Samba Makumba from Fuuta Toro reported in Trinidad that

the Mahometans are forbidden to make slaves of those of their own faith, and when any of their people are concerned in this traffic, they believe their religion requires them to put a stop to it by force. It was for this purpose a war was commenced by the Fullahs against these other tribes, and in this war Samba was taken prisoner and sold as a slave.³³

Samba, who was sixty in 1841, observed that “he belonged to the tribe Fullah Tauro [Fuuta Toro], which engaged in a war with six other tribes in Africa to prevent them, as he said, from carrying on the slave trade.” Ṣāliḥ Bilali of Timbuktu, who was born in Masina around 1770, had been enslaved by Bambara and sold from Segu to Asante; subsequently, from Anamobu he went to the Bahamas before arriving finally in South Carolina.³⁴ Rosalie of the “Poulard Nation,” which indicates that she was Fulbe, is another example of a Muslim who was enslaved in this period.³⁵ According to Rebecca Scott and Jean-Michel Hébrard, she was probably born around 1767 and enslaved sometime after 1780. Rosalie was unusual in being one of the very few Fulbe females reported to have been enslaved. It is also possible that she was actually enslaved as early as 1775 or 1776, when the Moors invaded Waalo and enslaved many people, and when the jihād state of Fuuta Toro was being founded.³⁶ Although there were Fulbe women reported in the Americas, they represent only a small portion, except in Louisiana, where they constituted about 25 percent, and in Maranhão, where they were about half the total.³⁷

In the case of Fuuta Jalon, the Islamic state attempted to control the course and direction of the slave trade, not only because it dominated the highlands inland from the coast but also because it forced trade to flow to the north via the Gambia River or southward toward the Sierra Leone River. The relatively few Muslims who reached the Americas included those from Fuuta Jalon, but overall, the Muslim interior of West Africa was underrepresented in terms of the numbers of slaves who moved as part of the transatlantic migration. In fact, Zachary Macaulay reported in 1793 that there was strong opposition in Fuuta Jalon to involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and that the succession crisis after the death of Almami Sori was a consequence of this opposition, which is probably an exaggeration but is nonetheless significant as an indication of attitudes toward the enslavement of Muslims.³⁸ With the onslaught of jihād, there were attempts to suppress the sale of slaves who might be Muslims to non-Muslims. Fulbe clans established their political dominance over the Jalonke population in the highlands to which the Senegal, Gambia, and Niger Rivers trace their origins. Centered at Labe and Timbo, the Fulbe developed a vibrant plantation economy based on slave labor and otherwise maintained commercial links with the Muslim interior through connections with the Mandinka towns, such as Dinguiraye, Kankan, Sikasso, and others that were on the route to the inner Niger basin. In Fuuta Toro, Almami Abdul Kader reached an accord with the French at St. Louis in 1785 that allowed French merchants to pass up the Senegal River to obtain gum arabic and slaves upon payment of a tax but prohibited the purchase of slaves in Fuuta Toro itself.³⁹

The jihād leadership was conscious of tradition and hence was preoccupied with analyzing whether the conditions for jihād were present. The signs were discussed, events and motives were justified through reference to tradition, and a template for jihād was mythologized. There were recognizable building blocks that had to be in place, most especially conditions in which Muslims were being oppressed and were forced into a retreat where war was initially justified as defensive and unavoidable. Indeed, when such conditions prevailed in the Hausa state of Gobir and elsewhere, Muslims flocked to the camp of ʿUthmān dan Fodio and his supporters, which was established at Degel in the 1790s. By following the events and statements of the jihād leadership, it is possible to discern what it took to undertake a jihād and how the movement benefited from an association with earlier jihāds, particularly in West Africa, that led to the establishment of three Muslim states, all dominated by Muslims who were also considered to be ethnically Fulbe. The tradition of jihād as developed in West Africa from Fuuta Bundu to Sokoto had a common feature in that the leadership was Fulbe, and this tradition continued. The same was true in the establishment of the Hamdullahi Caliphate, which initially was under Sokoto. Al-Ḥājj ‘Umar himself, being Fulbe, had pretensions to succeed Muhammad Bello as caliph of Sokoto upon Bello’s death. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar was married to Bello’s daughter, but the succession went to Bello’s brother. Even the Mahdist state of the Nilotic Sudan relied heavily on the Fulbe, who were known in the Nilotic Sudan as Fellata and formed the backbone of the Mahdist military. With the assassination of the Mahdi, the succession passed to Abdallahi, who was the head of the military.

This ethnic compatibility between the Fulbe leadership and the Muslim intellectuals of diverse backgrounds, combined with the success of jihād across Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, facilitated the spread of ideas and justification through the rigors of Islamic scholarship. Indeed, the migration of young men who wished to be employed in armies or to study under teachers who were attached to the mosques of the principal towns was a major factor in consolidating the appeal of jihād and reform. This movement of students overlapped with commercial travel, and the distribution of slaves through long-distance trade meant that all the Muslim regions of sub-Saharan Africa were well integrated. This can be seen in the surviving biographical accounts of Muslims who somehow ended up in slavery despite the efforts to prevent such fateful loss of freedom. In general, trade and marketing were organized in a way that promoted regional integration. In the western parts of West Africa, Muslims who were identified as Juula and who spoke the same language (Malinke) were closely linked to the Qādiriyya. They controlled long-distance trade, with outposts from Senegambia as far east as the Hausa cities and Borno. A similar Hausa commercial diaspora radiated outward from the central cities of the Hausa states and later the Sokoto Caliphate, particularly Kano, Zaria, and Katsina, but in the case of this commercial system, the language of trade was Hausa. The network extended to the middle Volta basin and Asante, to the Yoruba coast of the Bight of Benin, and eastward as far as Wadai. Both Juula and Hausa merchant networks were linked across the Sahara and hence were tied to the extensions of trade from Morocco, whose immigrants to sub-Saharan Africa known as shurfa (Hausa: Sharifai) claimed to be direct descendants of the Prophet, whether or not the reality substantiated their claims. This overlapping series of networks also connected with the Ottoman domains from Algiers to the Hijaz and even the Jellaba merchants of the Nile River valley and the trade of Wadai and Darfur.

Specifically, the commercial interior of West Africa was controlled by Muslim merchants who operated along trade routes between dispersed towns where there were communities with which they identified.⁴⁰ These dispersed networks have sometimes been referred to as “commercial diasporas,” following the lead of Philip Curtin and Abner Cohen.⁴¹ The concept of diaspora is used to describe the social organization of the merchants who formed the layers of commercial networks that dominated the trade from the interior to the coast of West Africa. Traders operated over considerable distances and relied on agents and partners who were resident in towns and cities along the trade routes that were often far from the homelands of the merchants. The two principal diasporas included the “Juula” (also Dyula), which means “merchant” in the languages of the Manding, and the “Hausa,” which was centered in the central Bilād al-Sūdān. Both ethnic terms reflected the use of a common commercial language, either the Juula dialect of Malinke or Hausa, as well as identification with Islam. This structure of trade became particularly significant after the Moroccan invasion of the Songhay Empire in 1591–92 and the ending of the hegemonic Muslim state that encompassed much of West Africa from Senegambia to the Hausa cities of the central Bilād al-Sūdān. In the absence of a centralized state, these commercial networks, which constituted a complex diaspora, assumed the function of connecting the many towns and cities into an interlocking grid that relied on Islam as a unifying ideology.

The structure of trade and marketing provided economic linkages over a wide area and was centered on a commercial diaspora that depended for its operation on connections that nurtured an intellectual, scholarly, and religious hierarchy steeped, to a greater or lesser degree, in Islamic learning. For its functioning, the commercial system depended on the maintenance of links among communities based on kinship, personal friendships, and religious instruction, as well as business partnerships. The urban-centered commercial structure was matched by a rural structure based on transhumance migration and management of livestock and sedentary settlements of plantations and farms on which slaves worked. The jihād movement thus brought together a range of Muslims whose identities crossed ethnic boundaries and required knowledge of and fluency in more than one language, one of which was Arabic for the intellectual elite. All men had to have attended Qurʾānic school as boys and had to be more or less literate. They were expected to attend mosque on Fridays and to engage in communal prayers that highlighted this emphasis on literacy, the acquisition of knowledge, and travel, explicitly encouraged by the tenets of Islam that sanctified pilgrimage to Mecca and the many centers of learning along the routes to the Hijaz.

An example of the interlocking commercial and religious connections across West Africa can be gleaned from the biography of Abū Bakr al-Siddīq, who was born in Timbuktu around 1790 and was brought up in Jenne, farther south on the Niger River. Abū Bakr’s life story is known from his autobiography and other documents that came to light in Jamaica, where he became associated with R. R. Madden, special magistrate at the time of the British emancipation of slaves in 1834.⁴² Abū Bakr’s father, Kara Mūsā, who traced his ancestry to Shaykh ‘Abd al-Qādir, was of shurfa descent, that is, someone who claimed to be a descendant of the Prophet, which in turn traces his origin to Morocco. The family had been prominent among the Muslim learned class in West Africa for generations. Kara Mūsā was considered tafsīr (a West African grammatical corruption of mufassir, a scholar who specialized in Qu’ranic exegesis) and was a prominent merchant. Abū Bakr received his early education in Jenne and at age nine began an extended tour of Muslim centers in West Africa, first at the Juula town of Kong and then at Bouna, where, according to Ivor Wilks, ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Ḥajj Muhammad al-Watarawi presided over a community of scholars drawn from many parts of the western Bilād al-Sūdān. Indeed, Abū Bakr’s teachers included not only al-Watarawi but also Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir Sankari from Fuuta Jalon, Ibrāhīm ibn Yūsuf from Fuuta Toro, and Ibrāhīm ibn Abī al-Ḥasan of Silla, who was originally from Dyara, an important Soninke center near Nioro, north of modern Bamako. Moreover, Abū Bakr’s mother, Ḥafsah, who was known as Nagode (Hausa: “I am thankful”), was from Katsina but also had family in Borno. Her father, Muhammad Tafsīr, had been on pilgrimage to Mecca, and he and her brothers were involved in trade with Borno and the middle Volta basin and Asante. Abū Bakr’s trade with his father-in-law, Muhammad Tafsīr, included gold, as well as horses, donkeys, mules, and silks that had been imported from Egypt, and although Abū Bakr does not mention them, kola nuts were almost certainly sent to Katsina as well. Thus Abū Bakr was associated with the intellectual and commercial diaspora that stretched from Senegambia to Lake Chad in the eighteenth century.⁴³

As Abū Bakr’s account demonstrates, the interior trade of the western and central Bilād al-Sūdān constituted a diversified regional commerce that was to a large extent ecologically determined, and goods imported via the Atlantic and the Sahara supplemented this regional trade of West Africa.⁴⁴ The variety of goods that were traded reflected a pattern of commerce that was closely associated with ecological regions and localized niches of production. Commodities included agricultural products, livestock, minerals, and manufactured goods. Many towns and cities of the interior grew with the development of extensive regional markets. Trade across ecological zones from the desert through the Sahel and the savanna to the forested regions of the coast fostered economic exchange. For example, livestock and salt were produced in the desert and the Sahel, whereas agricultural products, such as grain, root and tree crops, cotton, and indigo, were prominent in the region, depending on local conditions. Moreover, such manufactured goods as cotton textiles and leather products were centered in the many towns and cities in the agricultural zones. In addition to kola nuts, various types of salt were also widely distributed that were used not only for culinary purposes but for various medicinal purposes for both people and animals and for industrial needs in textile dyeing, the tanning of leather, and soap production. Some salts were also mixed with tobacco for use as snuff or for chewing, stashed already prepared for ingestion in leather pouches. Kola nuts and gold were key commodities from the forested regions inland from the Sierra Leone River, the region south of Wagadugu, and the Akan forests.⁴⁵

The Muslim commercial networks across West Africa comprised socially determined communities based on common origins. Merchants of these commercial networks were recognized as Hausa, Maraka, Yarse, Jakhanke, or Wangara or employed self-identifying names, such as Saghanughu, Kabā, and Ture, that associated individuals with particular towns and regions of origin.⁴⁶ Curtin actually studied one of these networks, the Jakhanke, on the basis of which he first developed the concept of commercial diaspora. His work was reinforced by the excellent study of the Jakhanke by Lamin Sanneh.⁴⁷ The recognition of Islam as the religion of community, the use of common commercial languages, either Hausa or Manding and its dialects, such as Juula, and the maintenance of social relationships and kinship over great distances formed the basis of layered and overlapping commercial diasporas that facilitated the operation of trading networks. The communities of the diaspora provided the infrastructure for the commercial networks and for the religious, marital, kin, and intellectual networks that constituted the diaspora and tied it to the homeland or a central town or city. Although the focus here is on the commercial and legal dimensions of the Muslim diasporas in West Africa, it should be recognized that these diasporas not only serviced trading networks but also, like other commercial diasporas, accommodated other kinds of networks that were religious, kinship based, educational, marital, and commercial. Diasporas operated across space over long distances and were based on communities that served as outposts for commercial and culturally specific interactions. The population associated with diasporas was used to traveling, often involving marriage to partners in towns along the trade routes. The constituents of commercial diasporas were instructed to travel for business, for an education, or to visit relatives and to engage in apprenticeship in trade and craft production. Mobility in the operation of long-distance trade was reinforced as a way of life through parallel migrations for other reasons.

The centrality of learning and hence basic education was a feature of the jihād movement. It was through teaching and the dissemination of historic texts that Islam was consolidated as the dominant religion in the interior of West Africa. The centrality of literacy was not new but had characterized the religious and political elite for generations and had predominated during the era of the Songhay Empire. By the end of the eighteenth century the importance of literacy lay in the means of focusing on the cause and course of jihād. The literary flowering of the jihād movement can be likened to the European Enlightenment’s role in inspiring and directing the age of revolutions. In this sense the age of jihād finds a parallel with revolution elsewhere and was indeed linked with Muslims throughout West Africa, in the Maghreb, and elsewhere in the Islamic world.

Lamine Kabā, who was born in Fuuta Jalon about 1780 and arrived in the United States around 1807, provided a detailed account of education in the jihād states. According to his biographer, Theodore Dwight Jr.,

Lamen Kebe . . . ​was born in the kingdom of Futa Jalloo [Fuuta Jalon], and travelled sufficiently during his youth to give much interest to the accounts he communicates. He performed two journeys, when quite young, to the Jaliba or Niger River, in one instance in company with an army of Mahomedans, in a successful war upon an idolatrous nation, to convert them to Islamism. His education, which commenced at fourteen, and was finished at twenty-one, was obtained chiefly at Bunder, the city in which a late and expensive English expedition of discovery met a fatal defeat from the natives. He was a school-master five years in the city of Kebe [Kangaba], which he left to travel to the coast, to obtain paper for the use of his pupils, when he was taken and sold as a slave.⁴⁸

His father was “Serecule,” that is, Sarakole; his mother was of the “Manenca” nation. He had originally lived north of Fuuta Jalon at Diafun or Jafunu and subsequently at Jaga (Diaga), but a plague of locusts drove the family to eastern Fuuta Jalon. According to what Dwight was told, teachers “devoted years to study and instruction,” including women who “rivalled some of the most celebrated of the other sex in success and reputation for talent and extraordinary acquisition.”⁴⁹ Dwight’s report emphasized the importance of education:

Schools in several countries of interior Nigritia are supported by the government, on such a liberal and judicious system, that all the children have the means of instruction in reading and writing at least, on low terms; while the poor are taught at the public expense, taxes being laid to pay the master or mistress. Private schools are also very numerous, particularly in the larger towns of some of the most learned nations. In some schools, boys and girls are under the care of the same master; but they are placed in separate rooms. Our informant had from fifty-five to fifty-seven pupils in his native town, after he had completed his education, among whom were four or five girls. His scholars, according to the plan pursued in his education, were seated on the floor, each upon a sheepskin, and with small boards held upon one knee, rubbed over with a whitish chalk or powder, on which they were made to write with pens made of reeds, and ink which they form with care, of various ingredients. The copy is set by the master by tracing the first words of the Koran with a dry reed, which removes the chalk where it touches. The young pupil follows these marks with ink, which is afterwards rubbed over with more chalk. They are called up three at a time to recite to the master, who takes the boards from them, makes them turn their backs to him, and repeat what they were to do the previous day, which they have a decided interest in doing to the best of their recollection; because it is the custom to mark every mistake with the stroke of a stick upon the shoulders.⁵⁰

Dwight thought that “the mind of our informant shows some of the traits of a professional school-master, and his opinions on pedagogy, claim some attention, as they are founded on experience, and independent of those current in other countries.” Lamine told Dwight that

children should not be allowed to change school. In our country, no such thing is known or permitted, except when absolutely necessary. It is indeed permitted to a boy who has learnt all his master has to teach, to seek other teachers during the recess of his own school, if he does not neglect his own; and it is not an uncommon thing for an intelligent youth to attend the instructions of two or three teachers at different hours of the day.⁵¹

Moreover, education was closely associated with trade. Wherever Muslim merchants were found, there were schools.

The region in which Muslim merchants were operating between the Sahara and the West African coast encompassed several currency zones, including cloth strips, gold, cowrie shells, and silver, by the end of the eighteenth century. Merchants and their employees had to be adept at dealing with the various currencies, as well as the changing political circumstances. They used gold (based on the gold-dust measurement of the mithqāl, a unit of weight usually equivalent to 4.25 grams) of the western Sahel and Sahara, cowries in a wide zone in the savanna and the forest, and silver coins more extensively, beginning in the late eighteenth century. Concurrently, in some places various commodity currencies prevailed, such as strips of cloth and iron objects that resembled small hoes.⁵² The landlord-brokers who were resident in the various towns and cities of West Africa were responsible for dealing with currency exchange and credit. Cowries were bulky and difficult to transport, and hence landlords vouched for sales and purchases of commodities, taking a commission on sales but also safeguarding both commodities and cash. Landlords were therefore essential to the operation of trade because of the vagaries of currency supplies and liquidity. They also warehoused the goods of long-distance trade, provisioned caravans, and provided other services to itinerant merchants, including feeding them and tending livestock.⁵³

In addition to this dispersed commercial structure, the interior of West Africa was also held together through the transhumance migrations of Fulbe cattle herders and desert nomads, particularly the Tuareg and the Maure, which also helped integrate West Africa. Like the merchants, these nomadic peoples also relied on Islam as a means of unification, drawing on the Islamic legal system to regulate community relationships and to settle disputes in the absence of centralized states.⁵⁴ Although the Fulbe originated in the Senegal River valley, they came to monopolize cattle rearing across all of West Africa by the sixteenth century. Cattle were moved across the open savanna in a generally northerly and southerly pattern to follow pastures and available supplies of water, and in the course of this transhumance they gradually drifted eastward as far as Lake Chad and eventually even farther east. The Toronkawa, to which the family of ʿUthmān dan Fodio belonged, settled in the Hausa region before the eighteenth century, for example. Because they traced their origins to the Senegal valley, as other Fulbe did, they could rely on clan ties, linguistic compatibility, and other cultural traits to reinforce an ongoing interaction. The Fulbe leadership thereby amassed considerable resources that derived from the retention of common traditions arising from this economic niche. The elite controlled the herds of cattle, horses, goats, and sheep but also invested in landed estates that relied on slave labor to produce agricultural products and provide bases of operations for nomadic herds.

Similarly, desert nomads, whose dominance of tracts of land in the Sahara and the Sahel was based on the rearing of camel herds but also other livestock, followed their own transhumance patterns of migration. In the course of moving herds in search of water and pasture, they also took advantage of the transport capacity of the camels to move commodities to market, particularly various types of salt processed at desert and Sahelian locations, grain (especially sorghum and millet), textiles, leather goods, agricultural tools, and other commodities, including kola nuts. Like the Fulbe, the desert nomads also invested heavily in agriculture through the establishment of slave estates on often marginal lands that could be very productive in good seasons but risked poor harvests in years of little rain. Hence the Kel Gress, Itisen, and Kel Ewey, among other Tuareg, established economic corridors of trade and production that fed desert salt into savanna markets and moved agricultural output from areas of surplus to markets. They hired out transport services while their camel herds remained in the savanna during the long dry season. The nomads also supplied camels for trans-Saharan trade, which usually followed a relay network that involved other nomads who lived farther north in the Sahara to connect with Morocco and the Ottoman domains of the Mediterranean. These networks also facilitated the pilgrimage to Mecca and the Hijaz. The rearing of donkeys and horses was equally important; the donkeys were needed for transport, sometimes over considerable distances, while horses formed the military backbone of the many warlords who controlled the savanna.

This desert-side economy based on transhumance thereby encouraged migration and interaction over considerable distances, which meant that the cultural unity of West Africa was far more secure than the fragmentation of the political landscape might suggest. After the collapse of Songhay in 1591–92, the many walled towns across West Africa allowed local elites to hold sway over limited tracts of territory. Despite the criticisms of Muslim intellectuals that these elites did not promote Islam sufficiently and oppressed the peasantry, in fact, these states provided security for local peasant production of grain, cotton, and other agricultural commodities. The manufacture of textiles and the curing of leather goods enabled regional industrial output for markets that encompassed most of West Africa and even stretched across the Sahara. Ecologically, trade and production followed a gradient from desert to rain forest; the presence of tsetse flies limited where livestock were to be found, and the seasonal fluctuations in rainfall guaranteed a symbiosis between nomads and sedentary farmers.

The friction that inevitably existed in this political economy pitted the rulers of towns and states against the heads of the nomadic livestock herders because of claims to taxation and efforts to avoid exactions by nomadic herders. Wherever Fulbe clan leaders and desert nomads established agricultural estates, it was necessary to work out arrangements with warlords who controlled the territory. When these arrangements broke down, nomads could migrate, but in doing so, they might lose control of slaves who were settled on the land in any particular state. The risks of raiding, confiscation, and outright theft were therefore a constant impediment to political unification and consequently exacerbated the cultural divisions between nomads and sedentary populations. Once again, adherence to Islam became a means of addressing this friction, particularly when the call to jihād was directed at transforming the political landscape.

The early jihāds of Senegambia and the highlands where many of the rivers of West Africa originate addressed the perceived injustices of the established governments of the region, particularly the indiscriminate use of military force in the subjugation of the populace. The opposition to the non-Muslim governments of Segu and Kaarta in the region among the rivers has long been recognized. The interpretations in virtually all historical analysis pit Muslims against these Bambara states. In fact, the term “Bambara” as an ethnic category and their identification as non-Muslims reflected the tensions that moved West Africa toward jihād. Unlike governments closer to the coast, the ruling elites of the interior relied on military force based on cavalry and inevitably employed slaves to tend the horses and to staff the military. Bambara referred both to an ethnicity that was not considered Muslim and to the political authority of states that were also charged with harassing Muslims. Muslim merchants used the term to justify the purchase and sale of slaves who were implicitly identified as non-Muslims or who were classified as not being Muslims. The people of Segu and Kaarta, the “Bambara” states, were Bamana ethnically, their language was a dialect of the Mande languages of the region, which also included Malinke and Juula, and they were often recognized in the Americas as Mandingo or Mandinga if they were Muslims. This confusion in terminology has affected the study of slave culture in the Americas. Unpacking these terms and establishing their historical context is part of the task of figuring out how West Africa fitted into Atlantic history and the age of revolutions.

Slavery underpinned the confusion over ethnic, religious, and political terminology. To be “Bambara” in West Africa meant that a person could be enslaved as far as Muslims were concerned. The Muslims who held such views included the merchants of the Muslim commercial diaspora, the intellectual elite, and those who championed jihād. This ethnic labeling that was associated with slavery can be traced back to Aḥmad Bābā in the early seventeenth century and his predecessors before then. Aḥmad Bābās scholarship, which was influential in the jihād movement, was the culmination of a tradition that emphasized jurisprudence and syntax and was associated with the Baghayogho, a Soninke clan that spread throughout the Malinke regions of Mali and then the Songhay Empire and was also referred to as Wangara.⁵⁵ The term “Bambara” usually referred to those identified as Bamana who lived between the upper Niger River and the Senegal River and who became subjects of Segu and Kaarta and their non-Muslim governments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Linguistically and culturally, other than allegiance to Islam, they shared many features in economy and society with Mandinka and Soninke, whose affiliation with Islam was assumed on the basis of ethnicity.

Other distinctions of ethnicity were similarly ephemeral. Wolof and Fulbe in the Senegal valley shared allegiance to Islam and spoke mutually intelligible languages but were distinguished on the basis of economy. Wolof identified with the sedentary states of the Senegal region, including Waalo, while the nomadic population identified as Fulbe. The jihād movement changed this pattern; the states of Fuuta Bundu and Fuuta Toro emerged as states dominated by the Fulbe, as the designation “Fuuta” indicated. Various dichotomies characterized the cultural and political complexion of West Africa, including nomad versus sedentary and enslavable non-Muslims versus Muslims who under Islamic law were legally protected from enslavement. Language was often a signifier of identity, but most people spoke more than one language if they lived in contexts where such fluency was required, and Muslims by definition had to understand some Arabic, if only the daily prayers and the rudiments of education. Islam, and especially the consolidation of the Qādiriyya brotherhood, tended to transcend these dichotomies and to provide an alternate approach to identification. The Muslim commercial diaspora and the migrations of Fulbe and desert nomads propagated such affiliation within West Africa, that is, the region referred to in Muslim circles as Bilād al-Sūdān, “the land of the Blacks.”

The situation in Borno and the Hausa states during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was similar. There, too, Fulbe cattle nomads, their clan leaders, and the many agricultural estates that they established were found throughout the region, and as elsewhere in West Africa, the friction between the Fulbe, who were known in Hausa as Fulani, and the established governments of the Hausa states and Borno was pronounced. The main Hausa states that had been tributary to Songhay before 1591 subsequently fell under the sway of Borno, but a prolonged and serious drought in the middle of the eighteenth century disturbed this political context. The Tuareg nomads (especially Kel Ewey, Itisen, and Kel Gress) asserted their autonomy even while maintaining crucial economic links with the Hausa states because of the market for desert salt, textiles, grain, and other commodities. It was among the Tuareg that the first rumblings of jihād were to be heard, although in the end the Fulbe led the way. The Tuareg cleric Jibrīl ibn ʿUmar initially called for jihād in the late eighteenth century as a remedy for the injustices that he identified.

Inevitably the eighteenth-century wars among the Hausa states resulted in extensive enslavement (and reenslavement), and many captives were Muslims, some of whom ended up in the Atlantic world despite the efforts of some Muslims to prevent this fate, at least for freeborn Muslims. According to a Borno praise song dating to the late eighteenth century, “You can put chains around the necks of the slaves from other men’s towns and bring them to your own town,”⁵⁶ but that did not warrant their sale to non-Muslims. The problem was that many Muslims were slaves, and in those turbulent times ʿUthmān dan Fodio, the leader of the Sokoto jihād after 1804, and other Muslim leaders were concerned with the protection of the Muslim community and the welfare of the enslaved who were Muslims. Indeed, in these wars it was difficult to establish who was being reenslaved and who should have been protected because of their previous status as free and therefore, if captured in war or in raids, should have been ransomed and restored to their freeborn status. By 1800 there were many complaints about the enslavement of Muslims. Jibrīl ibn ʿUmar, whose influence on ʿUthmān dan Fodio was considerable, wrote that “the selling of free men,” by whom he meant Muslims, was forbidden, and he wrote this because he was aware that Muslims were being sold. For Jibrīl, this prohibition and similar ones on adultery, alcohol consumption, and manslaughter were the ways in which “our people are distinguished.” Failure to enforce such prohibitions was reason for deep concern, if not open rebellion against established governments that were unable or unwilling to enforce such strictures.⁵⁷ Similarly, Muhammad Tukur, a Fulani scholar who was a contemporary of ʿUthmān dan Fodio, composed a song that castigated those “who reduce free people to slavery without a legitimate reason.” Tukur charged that such actions were in discord with those of the Prophet, and indeed he classified such villains as “Unbelievers.”⁵⁸

Certainly non-Muslims were being enslaved, which was not a problem for Muslims if their status was clearly established. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (ca. 1710–72), who came from Borno and hence from an area of strong Muslim influence, was enslaved sometime in the 1720s. Gronniosaw was apparently not a Muslim or at least not someone whose status as a Muslim could have protected him from enslavement.⁵⁹ He claimed that he was from Zara, which might be identified with Azare, a town located between Borno and Kano, or even possibly the Hausa city of Zaria, although the latter seems less likely because the details he provides do not suggest that he was Hausa. His references to religion show that he came from an area in which people decidedly mixed their Islam with local non-Muslim practices if they adhered to Islam at all.⁶⁰ Gronniosaw reflected an impurity in belief that was subsequently used as justification for jihād. As Muhammad Bello, the son and successor of ʿUthmān dan Fodio, claimed, many people worshipped spirits that were thought to inhabit trees and rocky outcrops where shrines were located. Many Muslims condemned such practices and even advocated repression and persecution of those who practiced rituals associated with these shrines. Unfortunately, what Gronniosaw recorded is not always clear. Among his claims, he bragged that he was wearing gold on his body when he traveled along the well-established trade route from Borno through the Hausa cities and Borgu to the middle Volta River basin and to Asante.⁶¹ In fact, this was impossible, since gold came from Asante; it was not taken there. More likely, the reference to gold exaggerated his status and thereby made his fall from grace and sale into transatlantic slavery more tragic when in fact he probably was taken to Asante by kola merchants as a young slave for sale. Nonetheless, the sale of slaves to the coast was a complaint of the jihād leadership, even if Gronniosaw was not actually a Muslim. According to the interpretations of the jihād leadership, it was the responsibility of the master and the merchant to establish that someone who was enslaved was not a Muslim, rather than that of the individual slave to prove that he or she was illegally enslaved. The onus of proof also governed the sale of slaves to non-Muslims, including European slavers at the coast, since no one could ever be absolutely certain that an individual was not freeborn.

Muslims were enslaved, nonetheless, and individuals whose freeborn status might be questioned might find themselves enslaved. This was the case of the Hausa slave who became known as Pierre Tamata, who was purchased at Porto Novo or Ouidah by a French merchant sometime in the 1770s or perhaps earlier and taken to France, where he was educated. Tamata then returned to West Africa as an agent for French merchants from La Rochelle and subsequently became the principal merchant at Porto Novo in the 1780s.⁶² Whether he was a freeborn Muslim or not, Tamata was a willing collaborator in the slave trade to the French Caribbean and profited from his involvement. Nonetheless, he continued to identify as Muslim, and his son became the imam of the Muslim community in Porto Novo. His descendants still reside in Porto Novo, where a handsome mosque stands as testimony to his historic importance. Very few enslaved Muslims were sent from Porto Novo to the French Caribbean while Tamata was involved in the trade. It is not clear whether Tamata was responsible for assuring this commercial pattern, but at the same time, Muslims and many others whose allegiance to Islam might have been questionable did leave Porto Novo and other ports in the Bight of Benin, principally for Bahia. Enslaved Muslims were living in Porto Novo in the 1780s and 1790s and apparently in Dahomey as well, where they were also frequently engaged in crafts and in the military.⁶³

People who were identified as Hausa constituted a significant community in Bahia by the first decade of the nineteenth century, which confirms the criticisms of the jihād leadership in the interior that questionable sales of slaves to Europeans were taking place. The complaint was a fundamental objection of Muslims.⁶⁴ The extent to which slaves were Muslim at the outbreak of the jihād is difficult to establish, although information from Oyo and the Guinea coast, as well as the presence of enslaved Muslims, usually described as “Hausa,” “Tapa” (i.e., Nupe), and “Borno” in the Americas, demonstrates that enslaved Muslims were traded south, apparently increasingly so after the 1750s and certainly by the 1780s, when Oyo opened a direct route to the Bight of Benin and established its hegemony over Porto Novo and Badagry as a means of bypassing the route through Dahomey to Ouidah. Trade developed rapidly after 1770, when merchants began to buy slaves at Porto Novo, Badagry, and Lagos as well, and then there were discussions of establishing a French fort at Porto Novo. It was never built, but nonetheless the proposal demonstrates French interest in the area.⁶⁵ According to Peter Morton-Williams, Oyo developed the route to Porto Novo by settling slaves in the largely deserted Egbado districts, thereby creating a safe outlet to the coast that bypassed Dahomey, which paid tribute to Oyo but limited Oyo profits from the sale of slaves.⁶⁶ As the foremost merchant in Porto Novo, Pierre Tamata was instrumental in promoting Oyo commercial operations in supplying slaves for St. Domingue and other French islands in the Caribbean.⁶⁷ In the 1780s and early 1790s Tamata took advantage of his Hausa origin and his education in France to turn his business into a profitable enterprise, his former master “granting him credit to a considerable amount.”⁶⁸ Muslim merchants took their slave caravans south from the central Bilād al-Sūdān, crossing the Niger at Raka, which was located a few kilometers from the Niger River, near its confluence with the Moshi, and then went to Porto Novo, where Tamata served as their contact.

Many of the slaves who originally came from the central Bilād al-Sūdān were retained in Oyo, in Dahomey, or on the coast itself. By the end of the eighteenth century there was a large Yoruba population in Raka, even though the town was originally Nupe. According to Samuel Johnson, “Nearly all the children of influential Oyo chiefs resided there permanently for the purpose of trade.”⁶⁹ By the early nineteenth century enslaved Muslims had become a recognized and significant element in the Oyo military, especially the cavalry stationed at Ilorin, and in certain crafts in the Oyo capital.⁷⁰ Even as late as 1804, after the demise of the French trade, Porto Novo remained a principal source of slaves coming from Oyo; in a letter from King Hufon to Prince João of Portugal, 16 November 1804, Porto Novo was described as “the port where there is the greatest abundance of captives; the Ayos [Oyo] and Malês [i.e., Muslims] bring them here,” clearly along the route from Raka through Oyo.⁷¹ In 1812 Muhammad Bello described this trade in his geographical description of the central Bilād al-Sūdān. “Yarba,” by which he meant Oyo, was an

extensive province, containing rivers, forests, sands, and mountains, as also a great many wonderful and extraordinary things. . . . ​By the side of this province there is an anchorage or harbour for the ships of the Christians, who used to go there and purchase slaves. These slaves were exported from our country, and sold to the people of Yarba [Yoruba], who resold them to the Christians.⁷²

Bello’s comments are instructive. They reveal that the learned Muslim leadership was aware that merchants who inevitably would have been Muslims, since all trade passed through a commercial network that was Muslim, were involved in the sale of slaves to Oyo and hence to Christian merchants on the coast. As reports from the early nineteenth century make clear, merchants traveled overland to Porto Novo from the “country of the Joos [Oyo],” which was “the principal negro nation,” passing through the country of the “Anagoos [Anago] and Mahees [Mahi]” but avoiding Dahomey, along “rivers, morasses, and large lakes which intersect the countries between Haoussa and the coast,” apparently referring to the lagoons between Porto Novo and Lagos.⁷³ Indeed, before 1807 Hausa traders “were continually to be met with at Lagos.”⁷⁴ This was the trade with the Christians that Muslim reformers wanted to stop and that was one of the causes of the jihād in the central Bilād al-Sūdān.

In his discussion of “important matters” in Masāʾil muhimma (1217/1802), ʿUthmān dan Fodio, also referred to as shaykh, wrote that the sale of any “Fulani” as a slave was strictly forbidden. Writing at Degel, which the Muslims had established in the face of political persecution, the shaykh based his ruling on the long-standing recognition that most Fulbe were Muslims. By this time tension between the followers of dan Fodio and the government of Gobir had reached an impasse. In a poem written in Fulfulde, Tabbat hakika, dan Fodio predicted that “one who enslaves a freeman, he shall suffer torment. The Fire shall enslave him, be sure of that!”⁷⁵ In another song he attributed the “troubles” of the central Bilād al-Sūdān to the disregard of freeborn status, condemning any actions that led to the “capture of a free man, not a slave; then follow this with enslavement.” His definition of who was a “free man” referred to Muslims.⁷⁶ In response to the questions of al-Ḥājj Shisummas ibn Aḥmad, a Tuareg cleric, the shaykh reiterated the criteria for the enslavement of captives, specifically addressing the concerns of freeborn people who had been enslaved and therefore morally and legally could not be enslaved, although their ransom could be demanded and proof of their status required.⁷⁷ Similarly, Muhammad Bello in Miftaḥ al-sadād also insisted that it was “not lawful to enslave the Fulani,” despite the fact that in the Bilād al-Sūdān there were some Fulani living between Katsina and Kano and to the west of Katsina whom Bello did not consider Muslims.⁷⁸ Such frequent pronouncements appear to reflect a situation in which the Muslim leadership thought that there was a serious problem with regard to slavery, not specifically with respect to slavery as an institution but with efforts to distinguish who could be enslaved and who should not be enslaved and what had to be done to regulate enslavement.

The various testimonies of ‘Uthmān dan Fodio, Muhammad Bello, and others apparently attest to the conditions of wide areas of West Africa. These complaints seem to have been common wherever Fulbe herded their cattle and Muslims like the Sulleibawa settled and began to teach. The inspiration of the Fuuta jihāds in Senegambia and the perceived transformation of political society in those states prompted the spread of resistance and criticism. As the level of education of many leaders demonstrates, there was a preoccupation with learning, political reform, and the demand for rights as Muslims. Protection from enslavement was considered the right of freeborn Muslims and recognition of the integrity of anyone who claimed that status. Slavery and the slave trade were factors in the jihād movement, as was autonomy from the European-dominated Atlantic world.

The first phase of the jihād movement that was concentrated in Senegambia had mixed results. On the one hand, the political boundaries of Fuuta Jalon and Fuuta Toro were relatively limited. Fuuta Toro controlled much of the Senegal River valley until 1796, but its territory was reduced thereafter. Fuuta Jalon was confined to the highlands from where the Senegal, Gambia, and Niger Rivers flowed. Political leadership in Fuuta Jalon was fractured among competing dynasties and rival claimants to succession to the position of almami. The regimes of jihād controlled land and concentrated enslaved populations for purposes of production, more so in Fuuta Jalon than in Fuuta Toro. On the other hand, the spread of Islamic education and the consolidation of Muslim societies were important achievements that had a wider impact than in the immediate states of jihād and laid the foundation for the later movement of al-Ḥājj ʿUmar and subsequent leaders who pursued a jihād model of social and political reform.