Tukulor Empire

In the middle of the nineteenth century a Muslim scholar from the Senegal valley, Omar Saidou Tall, led a holy war that built a large state across the western Sahel, in what is now Senegal, Guinea and Mali. Known as the Tukulor or Toucouleur Empire after his people, and shown on our maps as the Tukular Caliphate, it conquered the Bambara kingdoms of Kaarta and Segou and the Fula state of Massina, before falling to French colonial expansion in the early 1890s.

Omar Tall came back from the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1836 bearing the title El Hadj and recognised as caliph of the Tijaniyya Sufi order for the western Sudan. Following an extended period in Sokoto he settled in the Fouta Djallon highlands of present-day Guinea, where he wrote an important work on Tijani teaching. His preaching drew followers from many groups: Fula, Soninke and Moors, poor people resentful of local elites, slaves hoping to win freedom by fighting for Islam, and communities that wanted the Europeans expelled.

Tension with the rulers of Fouta Djallon led him in November 1849 to move his community to Dinguiraye, on land granted by the king of Tamba. The king grew alarmed at the weapons the community was gathering, attacked it, and was defeated in September 1852. Tall then declared jihad. His armies took Bambouk and in April 1855 seized Nioro, the capital of the Bambara kingdom of Kaarta, which became his own capital, though the newly conquered Bambara rebelled against forced conversion.

Pushing west towards Futa Toro and the Senegal River brought Tall up against the French, who were building commercial dominance along the river. His siege of their fort at Medina failed in July 1857 when the governor of Senegal, Louis Faidherbe, arrived with a relief force. A treaty in 1860 divided spheres of influence, leaving the Bambara states of Kaarta and Segou to Tall.

Tall now turned east. His army won at Witala in September 1860, helped by cannon taken from the French, and after a decisive victory at Segou on 10 March 1861 he made that city his capital. When the Fula state of Massina backed further Bambara resistance, he attacked it, a controversial step because it meant war on a fellow Muslim power. More than 70,000 people are said to have died in the fighting; the Massina ruler Amadu III was captured and executed, and his capital Hamdullahi fell in May 1862. But a great revolt broke out in Massina, the rebels besieged Tall in Hamdullahi and took it in February 1864, and he was killed soon after his escape.

Tall's son Ahmadu Tall ruled from Segou, while a nephew, Tidiani Tall, held Massina from Bandiagara. Ahmadu tried to centralise power, cultivated Bambara support against the Fula aristocracy and put down revolts by his own brothers in the 1870s and 1880s. The state was run by provincial governors, judges, military commanders and tax collectors, with ministers at Segou for justice, the treasury, the river fleet and foreign relations; a professional army took most of the budget. Constant raiding, inflation and weak control of the middle Niger were persistent problems.

As the French advanced inland they captured Nioro in 1891 and pushed Ahmadu back to Bandiagara. In 1893 they took full control and Ahmadu went into exile at Sokoto. The empire's remaining lands were formally incorporated into French West Africa in 1903. Much of the Sahel it once ruled is Muslim today, partly as a result of Omar Tall's campaigns.

Our 1878, 1880 and 1900 maps draw the Tukular Caliphate in the western Sahel, near the Sokoto Caliphate and the Samorian State; by 1900 its core had already been conquered and it was absorbed into French West Africa in 1903. Its fall belongs to the Scramble for Africa, and its heartland lies in today's Mali and Senegal.