Samori Ture

Samori Ture was a Mandinka Muslim leader who built a large West African state, often called the Wassoulou Empire, across parts of present-day Guinea, Mali, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso in the second half of the nineteenth century. From 1882 until his capture in 1898 he resisted French expansion during the Scramble for Africa for sixteen years, which made him a hero of anti-colonial movements, though some communities he conquered remember his rule as tyranny.

He was born around 1830 at Manyambaladugu, in what is now Guinea, the son of a Dyula weaver and merchant, and grew up at Sanankoro, trading kola nuts. In 1853 raiders of the Cissé clan seized his mother; to win her release he served the Cissé as a soldier for several years, learning to use firearms and embracing Islam. Freed around 1859, he joined and then took over a local war band. Between 1866 and 1873 he extended his power through force, bribery and marriage alliances, and in 1873 he won his first great battle at Bissandougou, which became his capital.

Allied for a time with the Muslim Kaba family of Kankan, he conquered the gold-bearing Buré country and the Wassoulou region, which gave his realm its name. He bought modern breech-loading rifles through Freetown in British Sierra Leone, and by about 1878 he styled himself faama, or military ruler. When the Kaba refused him troops for a war against the Cissé, he besieged and took Kankan, a great trading town, and defeated his old Cissé masters. In 1884 he proclaimed Islam the state religion and took the title Almamy. Forced conversions and the destruction of shrines provoked a revolt that his brother crushed brutally.

The French, pushing east from Senegal, clashed with him from 1882, when he sacked Kiniéran, a town they claimed as a protectorate. His infantry, the sofas, suffered heavily in frontal attacks on French troops, so he turned to mobile and hit-and-run warfare. In 1886 and 1887 he signed treaties that ceded the left bank of the Niger and nominally accepted French protection. He then besieged Sikasso, capital of the rival Kenedougou kingdom, for some fifteen months from 1887; the failed siege, with heavy losses to disease and a new rebellion, marked the turning point of his fortunes. At its height his army numbered perhaps 30,000 to 35,000 infantry and some 3,000 cavalry, and his blacksmiths learned to repair and even copy French rifles.

In 1891 a French column under Louis Archinard took Kankan and Bissandougou. Samori answered with scorched-earth tactics and a remarkable strategy: he moved his entire state eastward, conquering new land as a reserve while devastating what he abandoned. By 1893, cut off from his Sierra Leone arms route, he still led about 12,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry and a following estimated at 120,000 people. In 1895 he defeated a French column and took the trading city of Kong, which he destroyed in 1897 after it revolted. In 1897 his son's forces routed a British column near Wa and destroyed a French column at Bouna, renewing full-scale war.

After the French took Sikasso in May 1898, Samori retreated towards Liberia through mountainous forest, where thousands of his followers starved. On 29 September 1898 Captain Henri Gouraud surprised his camp at Guelemou and captured him. He was sentenced to exile, attempted suicide at Saint-Louis in Senegal, and was deported to a river island in Gabon, where he died of pneumonia on 2 June 1900. His lands became part of French West Africa.

The French presented their conquest as rescuing local people from the violence of his rule. From the interwar years African intellectuals rehabilitated him as a symbol of resistance, and his great-grandson Ahmed Sékou Touré became the first president of independent Guinea.

Our 1880 map shows the region of his rising empire on the upper Niger, and the 1900 map shows the same lands under French rule after his capture.