In the 1850s two men were building empires along the Senegal River, starting from opposite directions. One was Umar Tal, recently back from the pilgrimage to Mecca and eager to challenge the practices of the non-Muslim and nominal Muslim people of West Africa. The other was Louis Faidherbe, Governor of the Colony of Senegal. Under his administration the French extended their possessions from St. Louis and the Lower Senegal to the east and south. The two empires soon clashed, most dramatically at Medine in 1857, but soon afterwards they accepted the Upper Senegal as the boundary between their domains ó Umar's to the east, the French to the west.
The open conflict occurred up-river, but some of the most intense competition took place downstream in the ëmiddle valleyí of the Senegal, in the Islamic state known as Futa Toro. Here was Umar's birthplace and the most important source of recruits for his armies. When the pilgrim visited his native land in 1858-9, he transformed that recruitment into a massive exodus of families which shook Futa to its foundations. As for Faidherbe, he chafed at the age-old restrictions imposed by the authorities of Futa on access to the upper valley and its resources of gum and gold. By 1860 he had ceased to pay all duties, constructed forts and helped install pro-French chiefs throughout the country.
Faced with such irresistible subjects as Umar and Faidherbe, historians have treated Futa Toro as a passive receptacle of external initiatives and marked it off after 1860 as part of the Colony of Senegal. This book challenges those assumptions and delineates the process by which Abdul Bokar Kan restored the autonomy of the middle valley. His story merges with that of his country, and only with his death in 1891 did Futa Toro finally become French territory.
Senegambia, the area comprising modern Senegal and Gambia, is both part of the ancient Islamic tradition of the Western Sudan and of the history of interaction of Africans and Europeans along the coast. Accordingly, the story of Futa Toro and Abdul Bokar suggests two kinds of implications. On the one hand, it relates to the Islamic states created by reform movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Futa had, in fact, experienced not one but two major periods of reform, and yet welcomed the very ëunreformingí kind of leadership offered by Abdul in the late nineteenth century. On the other hand, this account relates to the European conquest and African response. In contrast to portrayals of inexorable expansion and militant resistance, it suggests a process of considerable complexity. Using the arts of diplomacy as much as those of war, Abdul Bokar showed that an indigenous society could regain its autonomy after a period of massive intervention and despite its location on a strategic artery to the interior.
The research for this book was conducted in Paris and Senegal in 1967-9, with the aid of a Foreign Area Fellowship of the Ford Foundation, in 1971, with the assistance of the Concilium on International and Area Studies of Yale University, and in 1973-4 through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I used the material initially to complete a doctoral dissertation at Columbia University in 1971. I would like to express my gratitude to innumerable Senegalese friends and colleagues, and, in particular, to:
I owe particular thanks to my colleague Leonard Thompson, not only for his criticisms but also for his unfailing encouragement.