Kong Empire

The Kong Empire, sometimes called the Watara or Ouattara Empire after its founding family, was a merchant-warrior state of West Africa centred on the town of Kong in what is now north-eastern Ivory Coast. From its founding around 1710 by Seku Watara until Kong was burned in the late 1890s, it guarded the trade routes that carried gold and kola nuts across a region now divided between Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Mali and Ghana.

The country around Kong was home to Gur-speaking farming peoples, above all the Senufo and Tyefo, who mostly followed local religions. From the fourteenth century Muslim Mande merchants, the Dyula, moved south from the Mali Empire and founded trading towns such as Begho, Bouna, Bondoukou and Kong. The road from the Niger to the goldfields, and later to the European forts on the Gold Coast, grew steadily more valuable, while wars with neighbouring states such as Gonja and Dagomba encouraged the rise of military chiefs.

In the early eighteenth century Seku Watara, a Dyula who had studied the Quran and traded before turning soldier, rallied several Dyula leaders and overthrew Lasiri Gbambele, a powerful figure in Kong. His forces and allied war leaders then seized towns along the trade routes, north towards the Black Volta and south to Boule. Seku reached Sya, the later Bobo-Dioulasso, in 1737 and left a son in charge there. His brother Famagan led a campaign west from November 1739, beat a force from Timbuktu at Sofara and besieged Segou, capital of the Bambara kingdom, for nine months, until a Fula relief column broke the siege. Seku died around 1745.

After Seku, the empire became a cluster of largely separate lordships, each held by a branch of the Watara family, although the branches still joined forces against outside threats and the house in Kong kept a senior position. Historians describe Kong as a state built to serve trade. Its warrior aristocracy lived outside the big towns, drew tribute from their own territories and kept many Mande traditions alongside Islam, while Muslim merchants exercised influence behind the scenes. Local commanders collected tribute, raised troops and protected the caravan roads.

Kong grew famous for its many Muslim clerics and scholars and for the mosques built across its lands, yet its rulers did not base their authority on Islam or enforce Islamic law, which set it apart from the jihad states of West Africa. A writer in 1907 remarked on the town's tolerance towards the beliefs of its neighbours. Mande townspeople and Senufo farmers lived side by side with little attempt to merge them.

In the mid-eighteenth century Kong fought the Asante Empire. Begho was destroyed and its refugees moved to Kong, but the war ended in stalemate, with Asante recognising Kong's independence. In the nineteenth century Asante redirected its trade north-east through Salaga towards the Hausa states, and Kong's commerce and reach shrank.

The French explorer Louis Gustave Binger reached Kong on 20 February 1888 and signed agreements with its leaders. These ties made the town a target for Samori Ture, whose Samorian State was expanding eastwards. A French column under Colonel Monteil was forced to retreat in 1895, and Kong pledged loyalty to Samori that April. When its merchants turned against him, Samori destroyed the city, on a date given as either May 1897 or May 1898. The surviving Watara rulers held small states that soon faded under French West Africa.

Our maps draw the Kong Empire in 1783, 1800, 1878 and 1880, spanning the long period between Seku Watara's conquests and the town's destruction by Samori in the late 1890s.