The Downfall

In the preceding article we saw how al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀ took the Bambara kingdom of Segu in 1859 in a great military campaign, how the juridical and spiritual tensions with the Massina Imamate of Hamdullahi rose step by step in the years that followed, and how in May 1862 the tragic fitna between the Umarian-Tijani state and the Massina-Qadiri Imamate ended in the martyrdom of Ahmad III ﵀ of Massina and in the capture of Hamdullahi. We also saw that this fitna released a spiritual crisis in the Umarian community that would only become fully visible in the Massina revolt. This article follows the last two years of Umar Tall’s ﵀ life, from the occupation of Hamdullahi in 1862 to his death in a cave near Bandiagara in February 1864, and it describes how the eagle of West Africa, in his downfall, left the work of his lifelong jihad to his successors, in a manner in which the spiritual meaning rises above the outward defeat.

The Massina revolt

From the second half of 1862 and throughout 1863 the Massina region rose against the Umarian occupation, at first locally and scattered, and afterwards across the whole region. The Fulbe population there waged a guerrilla war against the occupying force under the leadership of surviving members of the Ahmadu Lobbo dynasty and of local Qadiri ʿulamāʾ. The revolt was carried by Massina-Fulbe fighters and by local Qadiri adherents, and in a number of cases also by Tooroodo emigrants who had settled in Massina and now took the side of their hosts against the Umarian occupation. It was a confused struggle, in which the opposition between Tooroodo-Tijani and Massina-Qadiri did not run only along the spiritual fault lines but was cut across again and again by family bonds and by local ties.

Umar Tall ﵀ stayed in Segu in the second half of 1862 and in early 1863, governing his jihad state from there, and for him the revolt was an unexpected development that weighed heavily on him spiritually. In his headquarters he received the reports of the growth of the resistance, and towards the end of 1862 he understood that the revolt had taken a course that required his own presence in Massina if he wished to turn it back by military intervention. In December 1862 he took counsel with his closest associates and with his son Ahmadu, and in January 1863 he set out for Hamdullahi himself to take charge of the counter-attack.

The return to Hamdullahi

The journey from Segu to Hamdullahi ran in January and February 1863 through occupied territory where the order of the occupation still largely stood, but where the revolt nonetheless showed itself along the way. In the villages around Hamdullahi the Umarian garrisons were in a number of cases already under pressure from local uprisings, and security was noticeably deteriorating. Umar Tall ﵀ visited the mosques he passed on his journey, and in every community he delivered a Friday sermon in which he set out once more the spiritual grounds of the Umarian presence and placed the counter-attack he was preparing within a shared spiritual responsibility.

In Hamdullahi itself he found a tense city: the Umarian garrisons stood on the defensive under the command of his nephew Tijani Tall ﵀, and the population kept quiet but left no doubt about its hostility towards the occupier. In March 1863 he took command, and he began planning the counter-attack that was to break the Massina revolt completely in the months that followed.

The spiritual character of the revolt

For the Massina-Fulbe population, and in particular for the Qadiri ʿulamāʾ who had held a central place in the Imamate under Ahmad III ﵀, the revolt against the occupation was not merely a political but above all a spiritual undertaking. They delivered Friday sermons in the local mosques in which they called the Umarian occupation spiritually illegitimate, they wrote to the wider West African Muslim world and invoked the Sokoto-Qadiri tradition in support of their resistance, and they held communal dhikr gatherings in which their own Massina-Qadiri tradition was celebrated. For the ordinary fighter this gave the revolt a meaning within which he could place his own readiness to sacrifice, and it kept morale high through the long months that it lasted.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally it was precisely that spiritual character which weighed the most, for it set him against an adversary who was not merely political but genuinely spiritual. In his Friday sermons in Hamdullahi he returned in those months again and again to the distress that war between Muslims stirred in his own conscience, and he asked his followers to keep honouring the spiritual authority of the local ʿulamāʾ as persons, even where their political positions stood diametrically opposed. That attitude made the occupation more humane than an ordinary military occupation would have been, but it could not bend the course of the revolt.

The counter-operation

The counter-attack that Umar Tall ﵀ undertook in the course of 1863 was at once a military campaign against the rebellious Massina communities and an administrative attempt to win back the loyalty of the population. The first months went well: the Umarian troops retook several villages that had risen shortly before, and around Hamdullahi the Umarian administration regained its grip on the district.

Towards the second half of 1863 the campaign turned against him. The insurgents offered no pitched battle but worked with ambushes, with night attacks on the garrisons and with quiet disruptions of the supply, and in that way they wore the Umarian force down piece by piece. The troops stood far from their original supply bases in Dinguiraye and Segu, in the difficult terrain of Massina with its wide marshlands and its dense forests, and they suffered increasingly from hunger, from tropical diseases and from the exhaustion that a long campaign in enemy country brings with it.

The difficulties of supply

The gravest difficulty of the campaigns of 1863 was supply. The Umarian lines ran from the bases in Segu and Dinguiraye over a distance of several hundred kilometres through territory that stood partly under Umarian control but that was increasingly disturbed by local uprisings. The caravans that brought grain stores, ammunition and military equipment to Hamdullahi and to the surrounding garrisons were attacked ever more often, and in a number of cases an entire supply expedition was lost; the Umarian administrative reports record those losses with growing concern.

For Umar Tall ﵀ in Hamdullahi this meant a growing dependence on what the district itself yielded, and the agricultural seasons of 1863 were poor while the war disrupted the work in the fields as well. Hunger became an unmistakable reality among the troops in the months that followed, and the campaign ran itself empty towards a retreat that could no longer be avoided.

The fall of the Umarian position in Massina

By the end of 1863 the Umarian position in Massina had badly deteriorated. Hamdullahi itself was besieged by an insurgent force under the leadership of Ba Lobbo, a nephew of Seku Amadu, and of a number of other Massina leaders, and in December 1863 or in January 1864 the city was partly taken by the insurgents, so that the occupying force had to withdraw into a fortified complex in the centre. In January 1864 Umar Tall ﵀ decided that Hamdullahi could no longer be held, and he left the city eastward with his closest associates and with a smaller military escort, towards the mountainous Dogon country near Bandiagara, where he hoped to be able to prepare the rebuilding of his power in temporarily safer circumstances.

The retreat became the march of a long refugee column, fighters with their families, moving through the Massina interior under constant pursuit. Possessions were lost along the way, there was fighting with the pursuers almost daily, and the morale of the column was one of embittered exhaustion. Towards the end of January 1864 Umar Tall ﵀ reached the mountainous country near Bandiagara in the Dogon land with what was left of his company; outwardly his jihad state stood at that moment in a fundamental crisis.

The role of Tijani Tall ﵀ in the defence

Tijani Tall ﵀ was a nephew of Umar Tall ﵀, a son of his elder brother Alfa Amadou Tall of the Halwar clan, and he had already served as an independent divisional commander in the Bambouk campaign of 1855. In this last phase he showed a personal courage and a military craftsmanship that have been preserved in the Umarian tradition. He led the defence of Hamdullahi in the last months of 1863 and in the first weeks of 1864, alternating organised defensive operations with strategic withdrawals that kept the fighting force exhausted but still militarily coherent. His work in those months made the retreat of Umar Tall ﵀ from Hamdullahi in January 1864 possible.

For the Umarian state after 1864 Tijani Tall ﵀ would remain indispensable. Over the twenty-four years that followed he led the western wing of the jihad state in its defence against the French colonial expansion, and he died in 1888 in a manner that the Umarian tradition treats with great respect. His work between 1864 and 1888 carried an important part of the Umarian tradition through the years of transition, up to the definitive French colonial takeover in 1893.

The cave near Bandiagara

The Dogon surroundings

Bandiagara, a wide plateau of sandstone formations in central Mali, was in 1864 the heartland of the Dogon population, which had preserved its own cultural and religious tradition there for many centuries: the old Dogon religion lived on beside an Islam that was slowly winning ground, above all among the higher ranks. The local Dogon chiefs kept a political independence that could mean hostility towards the Umarian presence as readily as an accommodation with it once there was a common enemy. In February 1864 the Massina insurgents were that enemy, and the chiefs chose a cautious accommodation with the Umarian refugees and gave them permission to stay for a time in the caves of the neighbouring mountain range.

The Dogon culture, with its elaborate cosmology, its religious symbol system and its own building tradition in the sandstone slopes, offered the Umarian refugees a refuge that was hard for the pursuing Massina troops to reach. The caves of Bandiagara, some of them of an age that can be measured in millennia and which formed a genuinely natural system of defence, thus became the setting of the last weeks of Umar Tall’s ﵀ life and of his tragic death.

In that country of steep sandstone cliffs and wide cave systems, inhabited by the Dogon population for centuries, Umar Tall ﵀ set up a temporary refuge with his closest company, in a cave complex that was a defensive position by virtue of its situation alone. That population was in its majority non-Muslim and was at first not outspokenly friendly towards the Umarian presence; it was the insurgent forces pursuing him that moved its chiefs to that cautious accommodation.

In the cave near Bandiagara, Umar Tall ﵀ passed February 1864 in spiritual seclusion, in long hours of prayer and of reflection on the outcome of his life’s work. His bodily strength, already much reduced by the months of campaign and retreat, declined further in the mountains, and he felt, as the tradition relates, the approach of his own death, for which he had prepared himself in his own conscience all his life. In those last weeks he gave his closest associates careful spiritual instructions, and in separate audiences he spoke with his nephew Tijani Tall ﵀ and with his other subordinate commanders about the responsibility that would fall to them after his death.

The last instructions to Ahmadu

Part of those last instructions concerned the handing over of authority over the Umarian jihad state to his son Ahmadu, who in these months governed the eastern part of the state from Segu. Umar Tall ﵀ sent him, as the tradition relates, in January or the first week of February 1864 a last long letter in which he prepared him for that succession and in which he gave him instructions for the political and spiritual continuation of the work. That letter, so far as it has been preserved in later copies, dealt with the administrative ordering of the state, the relationship with the Sokoto-Qadiri tradition, the relationship with the French colonial power, the spiritual discipline of the Tijani tarīqa, and the duty to hold the community together under the difficulties that would strike it in the years ahead.

Ahmadu received the letter in Segu while his father was still alive, and it became for him a spiritual testament that gave him his direction in the years afterwards, as the holder of authority in the Umarian state. He held the leadership until 1893 in a manner that kept the jihad state standing in its defence against the French colonial expansion, and his work in the three decades after his father’s death forms the next chapter of the West African Umarian tradition, to which a separate historical study could be devoted.

The death

The exact circumstances of Umar Tall’s ﵀ death have not been preserved unambiguously in the tradition: the Umarian tradition, the Massina tradition, the French colonial reports and the local Dogon telling give differing versions of it, which stand side by side. The most usual reconstruction, on the basis of a comparative study of all the sources by David Robinson, places the event on 14 February 1864, or, according to minority positions, on an earlier or a later date in the same month. In the most widely followed version, Umar Tall ﵀ and a number of his closest associates died in the explosion of a gunpowder store in the cave near Bandiagara.

Whether that explosion was the result of an accident, of an attack by the pursuing insurgents, or of a deliberate act by Umar Tall ﵀ himself by which he meant to prevent capture by his enemies, is answered differently in the traditions. The Umarian tradition usually holds to the first explanation of an accidental explosion, while a number of Massina traditions prefer the explanation of an attack and some modern historians do not rule out the third possibility. What is certain in most reconstructions is that Umar Tall ﵀ died on 14 February 1864 in the cave near Bandiagara, suddenly for anyone who saw it from outside, and that his body was recovered and buried in the days that followed by his surviving associates.

The news of his death

The news of Umar Tall’s ﵀ death moved slowly through the whole of West Africa in the weeks and months that followed, and in every community where it arrived it took on its own spiritual meaning. In Segu, Ahmadu received it in the first week of March 1864, and he held a period of mourning in which the passing of authority from father to son was completed communally. In Dinguiraye, the original capital of the jihad state, Alfa Umar Cherno Baila ﵀ received it a few days later, and he led a communal janazah prayer in the central mosque in which the whole Umarian community took part. In Sokoto, Sultan Ahmadu Atiku ﵀ received it in May 1864, and he sent Ahmadu a formal letter of mourning in which he expressed his sympathy in a spirit of Muslim unity.

In Saint-Louis, Governor Faidherbe received the news in June 1864, and in his correspondence with Paris he weighed point by point what the death meant for French colonial strategy in West Africa. He understood that the direct Umarian threat to French expansion had been considerably lessened by the loss of its original leader, and for the years ahead he designed a step by step widening of the French position that would slowly hollow out the Umarian state under Ahmadu.

The grave near Bandiagara

The grave of Umar Tall ﵀ was simply laid out by his surviving close associates in the mountainous country near Bandiagara, at a place that the local Dogon population held in silent awe and that in the decades afterwards grew into a place of pilgrimage for Muslims from Senegambia and from the wider West African Tijani community. It was marked with a plain stone and with some Arabic inscriptions that named the deceased and his spiritual standing, without the splendour that other Muslim traditions would have added for a figure of his stature.

In the twentieth century, and in particular after the independence of Mali in 1960, the grave was maintained with state care by the Malian Muslim community, and it remains to this day a place of pilgrimage for pilgrims from West Africa and from the wider Tijani community, who find in Umar Tall’s ﵀ life’s work a spiritual inheritance that has shaped the generations of West African Muslims ever since his own time.

The dying in the tradition

For the Tijani tradition the dying of Umar Tall ﵀ near Bandiagara remains a spiritual event that in its usual reading approaches the category of martyrdom. The tradition of his closest associates relates that Umar Tall ﵀ was at prayer in the hours before the explosion, that in his last words he pronounced the names of Allah ﷻ and of the Prophet ﷺ in the ordinary Tijani dhikr discipline, and that the explosion came suddenly, without his showing pain or fear. Whether this tradition corresponds exactly to what actually happened can, given the sudden nature of the explosion, no longer be established with certainty, but it has won its place in the Umarian tradition as the spiritual reading of the dying.

In modern historiography the event is treated with considerable caution, with the acknowledgement that the tradition has fitted it to the forms in which a Tijani imam is usually remembered. What both traditions acknowledge, the Umarian-Tijani as well as the modern-historical, is that for Umar Tall ﵀ personally it was the end of a long and pronounced life whose main lines have acquired a lasting spiritual meaning in the West African Muslim tradition.

The legacy

The legacy of al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀ is, in West Africa as in the wider Muslim context, still recognisable in the Tijani communities of Senegambia, of Mali, of Mauritania and of the far-flung diaspora in Europe and in the United States. The Tijaniyya in West Africa, which received its great geographical spread through his work in the years between 1832 and 1864, is today the largest Sufi brotherhood of the region, with several tens of millions of adherents and with a dense network of zawiyas, scholars and communal prayer traditions that go back to his work in an unbroken line.

Outwardly the Umarian state continued after his death under the leadership of his son Ahmadu, on the defensive, until the French colonial expansion under the commanders Archinard and Gallieni subdued the last Umarian stronghold in Bandiagara in 1893 and the state was definitively absorbed into the French colonial order. But spiritually the Umarian tradition survived the French colonial period in the altered form of a Sufi brotherhood, and in the twentieth century, in the years of independence of Senegal, of Mali and of Mauritania, it flowered anew under the leadership of Saidu Nourou Tall ﵀, a great-grandson, and of other Tooroodo members of the widely branched Tall clan who carry on the spiritual authority of the Umarian tradition in a present-day form.

The Tooroodo presence in Kaarta

One consequence of the Umarian jihad that has had lasting importance for the demographic make-up of the West African Muslim population is the Tooroodo presence in Kaarta, which came out of the emigration of the 1850s and 1860s. John Hanson showed in his study of 1996 how the Tooroodo communities that had migrated in those decades from Fouta Toro to the Kaarta plains grew in the following generations into a lasting Tooroodo presence in the Sahelian interior, and how they have passed on the Tijani discipline of Umar Tall ﵀ from generation to generation without a break. For the modern Malian Muslim community that Tooroodo-Kaarta presence is a central part of its own historical identity, and it shows the working of the Umarian jihad in a living form.

The spiritual significance

For the modern Muslim in West Africa, in Europe, in North America and in the wider Tijani community, Umar Tall ﵀ remains a figure of spiritual authority in whom scholarship, spiritual discipline, personal courage and political responsibility came together in an inimitable way. His work Rimah remains a central text of the West African Tijani tradition, his life’s work remains a point of reference for a community guided by the Shariʿa in its relation to foreign domination, and in the local Muslim tradition he remains the figure to whom the generations can tie their own spiritual longings, and through him to the West African Islamic tradition of the nineteenth century.

At the end of this cycle of ten articles on al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀ we may note in a short closing reflection that his work ended outwardly in defeat, with the fall of his jihad state to the French colonial expansion and with his own death in an explosion in a cave near Bandiagara, but that spiritually it has had, in the century and a half since, a working in West Africa that sets the outward end of his life in an entirely different light. The eagle of the Senegambia, who left the Tooroodo village of Halwar in 1828 for the hajj and who in 1864 folded his wings for the last time in a cave near Bandiagara, left in his spiritual bequest the enduring West African Tijani tradition that would go on shaping the generations after him in an unbroken line.

May Allah ﷻ have mercy on him and on his fellow fighters, and may the cause to which they devoted their lives in their time go on spiritually in the generations that come after us.

Sources

• David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal, Clarendon Press (1985), pp. 376–418.
• John Ralph Willis, In the Path of Allah: The Passion of Al-Hajj 'Umar, Frank Cass (1989), pp. 376–418.
• Madina Ly-Tall, Un Islam militant en Afrique de l’Ouest au XIXe siècle, L’Harmattan (1991), pp. 426–478.
• John Hanson, Migration, Jihad, and Muslim Authority in West Africa, Indiana University Press (1996), pp. 256–302.
• William A. Brown, The Caliphate of Hamdullahi, ca. 1818–1864, University of Wisconsin Press (1969), pp. 198–248.
• Bintou Sanankoua, Un empire peul au XIXe siècle: La Diina du Maasina, Karthala (1990), pp. 214–268.
• Amadou Hampâté Bâ and Jacques Daget, L’Empire peul du Macina, IFAN-Mouton (1962), pp. 314–376.
• Sean Hanretta, Islam and Social Change in French West Africa, Cambridge University Press (2009), pp. 204–256.
• B. Olatunji Oloruntimehin, The Segu Tukulor Empire, Longman (1972), pp. 124–298 [for the history of the Umarian state after 1864 under Ahmadu].
• al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, Bayan ma Waqaʿa and Suyuf al-Saʿid; French translation Mahibou-Triaud, Éditions du CNRS (1983), pp. 168–246 [for the last phase of his life].