Samorian State

The Samorian State was a West African empire built by the Mandinka leader Samori Ture in the upper Niger region, in what is now Guinea and southern Mali, during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Usually dated from about 1878 to 1898, it fielded a large, disciplined army with its own gun-making industry and fought French colonial expansion for some fifteen years. Defeated in its original homeland, it relocated eastwards into today's Ivory Coast before Samori's capture ended it.

The state had no official name. Its people called it Samoridugu, roughly "Samori's home". The name Wassoulou Empire, common in the twentieth century, comes from the memoirs of a French officer who confused Samori's realm with Wassoulou, one of the regions he conquered. Our maps use that name and also label the state the First and Second Samori Empire.

The death in 1864 of Umar Tall, founder of the Toucouleur Empire, loosened control over the region and allowed local leaders to assert themselves. Samori took command of a small war band and, between 1866 and 1873, extended his influence over the Toron region by force and alliance. Allied with the Kaba rulers of Kankan, he took several important towns, then seized the Bure goldfields. By 1878 he had proclaimed himself faama, or ruler, with his capital at Bissandugu, and in 1884 he adopted the Islamic title almamy.

At its height the state had around 300,000 people of many ethnic groups, divided into ten provinces and 62 cantons under military governors who also administered justice. Great councils of dignitaries decided major questions. The army dominated public life. Around 1887 Samori could put 30,000 to 35,000 infantry and some 3,000 cavalry in the field, organised in permanent units and trained partly by deserters from French colonial forces. Teams of smiths, working in specialised villages, copied French and other European rifles, though they could never supply enough guns, and imports through British-ruled Sierra Leone remained vital. Trade in gold, ivory and other goods, and increasingly in captives taken in war, paid for weapons.

After 1884 Islam became the state religion. Samori built mosques, set up Quranic schools and courts based on Islamic law, and suppressed traditional religious practices. Many communities resisted, and from 1885 forced conversions and the destruction of sacred sites provoked revolts, which his commanders put down harshly.

As the Scramble for Africa gathered pace, conflict with France began in 1882, when Samori's forces sacked Kiniéran, which the French had declared a protectorate, and then harried a French column back to the Niger. A series of treaties from 1886 fixed borders along the Niger, but relations stayed hostile. Samori's long siege of Sikasso, capital of the neighbouring Kenedougou kingdom, from 1887 to 1888 failed with heavy losses and set off new rebellions. In 1891 a French force took Kankan and the abandoned capital, Bissandugu. Samori responded with mobile warfare and a scorched-earth retreat, and in 1892 his council decided to move the whole state east.

By 1895 Samori was based at Dabakala, and that year his troops forced a French column to retreat and won the submission of the trading city of Kong. He destroyed Kong in May 1897 after it rebelled, and in August his son's forces killed the French officer Braulot near Bouna. The fall of Sikasso in May 1898 freed French forces to close in. Samori retreated towards Liberia through mountainous country, where thousands of his followers died of hunger, and on 29 September 1898 a French force under Henri Gouraud captured him at Guelemou. His lands were absorbed into French West Africa.

Our 1878 and 1880 maps show the state in its first homeland on the upper Niger, mostly in today's Guinea. Our 1900 map still draws it, although it ended with Samori's capture in September 1898; by then its last territory lay in today's Ivory Coast.