The Siege of Fort de Médine

In the previous article we saw how al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, between 1855 and early 1857, carried out the second phase of his jihad: the military subjugation of Kaarta, the peaceful incorporation of Bambouk and Bondou, and a diplomatic exchange with the French colonial authorities in Saint-Louis. We also saw how Governor Louis Faidherbe, in his new colonial doctrine, prepared the construction of Fort de Médine in Khasso, meant as a French position that would stand squarely in the way of Umarian expansion on the upper reaches of the Senegal. This article follows the Umarian attack on the fort in the spring and summer of 1857, the siege that ran from 20 April to 18 July and lasted roughly three months, and the relief by Faidherbe in person in the final phase, an outcome that was the first real military defeat of the Umarian jihad and that altered the strategy of the jihad state in a fundamental way.

The preparations on both sides

In the first months of 1857 both parties made the preparations that would determine the course of the siege. In Saint-Louis, Faidherbe had weapons, ammunition and reinforcements brought up to the fort by steamboats that sailed upstream every week, until the stores stood at a level at which the garrison could hold out even under a prolonged siege. He also kept a reserve force of several hundred tirailleurs at heightened readiness in Saint-Louis, expressly so that a relief expedition could be launched at the first sign of an Umarian attack.

In Dinguiraye, in those same months, Umar Tall ﵀ summoned his fighting force from the provinces of the Umarian state. The call to mobilization was circulated in every settlement and was answered with spiritual readiness by the Tooroodo, Fulbe and Mandinka fighters. With his closest associates he held meetings in which the tactical design of the operation was laid down, and he withdrew for some days into fasting and personal prayer, in which he entrusted the campaign to Allah ﷻ.

The Fort de Médine

Fort de Médine, begun in 1855 and completed in the spring of 1857, stood on the northern bank of the Senegal River in Khasso territory, by river roughly nine hundred and fifty to a thousand kilometres upstream from Saint-Louis, and 576 kilometres away as the crow flies. That difference is not academic, for the fort was supplied over the water and relieved over the water, and it was that navigable route which set the distance across which Saint-Louis could help. It was built to the French military architecture of the 1850s: thick earthen and stone walls in a square layout, bastions on the corners that could take one another’s avenues of approach under crossfire, an inner courtyard for the garrison, and a landing stage on the river where the steamboats could unload their cargo. On the ramparts stood several dozen cannon of various calibres, among them a few heavy coastal guns positioned in a distinctly offensive posture, and against an assault with edged weapons or with ordinary musket fire those ramparts could be held in relative safety.

The garrison stood under the command of Commandant Paul Holle, a mixed-race officer of French-Senegalese descent who had built his career in the French colonial service, and numbered at the opening of the siege sixty-four trained defenders: Holle himself, seven European soldiers, twenty-two Senegalese soldiers and thirty-four Senegalese boat-hands with rudimentary military experience. Around them stood several thousand Khasso fighters who were bound to the French under their local chiefs Hawa Demba and Sambala and who, by occupying the villages around Médine, formed a first line of defence, and within the walls a crowd of roughly ten thousand people had taken shelter, of whom roughly a thousand could in some sense be called soldiers. It is that distinction between the trained cadre and the armed crowd it had to deploy, and not any single number, that gives the defence of Médine its true proportion.

The strategic significance

For both parties, the whole relation between the Umarian jihad and the French colonial power hung on Fort de Médine. For Faidherbe the fort was the springboard for the French advance upstream into the Senegal valley and at the same time the barrier on which Umarian expansion downstream would break. For Umar Tall ﵀ it was the blockade that made his operations against Segu further east impossible for as long as he did not break it, and the first real French position that set his jihad against the colonial power in a direct armed encounter. If he took the fort, French colonial expansion would suffer a serious setback and the jihad would acquire an international spiritual and political authority that it had so far lacked. If Holle held it, French colonial strategy would be confirmed and the Umarian jihad, through its first real military defeat, would be forced into a fundamental reorientation.

The spiritual preparation of the community

Alongside the military and logistical preparations, Umar Tall ﵀ also undertook, in the winter months of 1856 into 1857, a spiritual preparation of his community, in a manner that would come to characterize the Umarian tradition. In the main mosque of Dinguiraye he delivered a series of Friday sermons in which he placed the approaching clash with the French colonial power within a spiritual frame, and he organized communal dhikr gatherings in which the Tijani discipline was observed at a heightened rhythm in preparation for the trial he expected. He also called together the local mosque imams and the naib administrators for an assembly in which the spiritual design of the campaign was jointly laid down and in which instructions were given for supporting it through prayer and zakat contributions.

The campaign was thereby not merely a military undertaking but a moment of community, in which those members who did not physically march along took part spiritually as well. It kept morale high, and in the months of siege that followed it carried the endurance of the fighters too.

The Umarian attack

In the spring of 1857 the Umarian force began its advance from Dinguiraye toward Fort de Médine, in a campaign whose size the sources put differently, for Robinson arrives at fifteen thousand fighters while the French tradition names twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand men: the core corps of talibé fighters with guns, and around them the Tooroodo, Fulbe and Mandinka militias that had formed within the jihad state during the campaigns of the preceding years. Umar Tall ﵀ led the campaign in person, with his son Ahmadu and with Alfa Umar Cherno Baila ﵀ as subordinate commanders, and with the logistical support on which the jihad could rely in its second phase.

The advance lasted roughly three weeks, interrupted for the tactical preparation of the attack and for the coordination of a number of smaller Mandinka allies who joined the force along the way. On 20 April 1857 the Umarian army stood before Fort de Médine and battle was joined. In the preceding days Umar Tall ﵀ had had an ultimatum of surrender conveyed to Commandant Holle, to which Holle had answered with a dignified refusal, and he now marshalled his force for the first assault.

The first assault attempts

In the first assault attempts, which ran from the end of April through May and into the first half of June 1857, the Umarian fighters advanced against the walls again and again in waves of several thousand men at a time, hoping to overwhelm the French defence by sheer mass. That tactic had worked every time in the preceding campaigns against Mandinka and Bambara forces, but here it ran up against a defending force whose armament and manner of defence were of an entirely different order from anything the jihad had met until then.

The cannon on the bastions, which could take the avenues of approach in organized crossfire, inflicted heavy losses in every assault. The tirailleur soldiers fired their guns down from the ramparts at a rate matched nowhere else in West Africa, and that too cost the attackers dearly. In the casemates the provisions and the ammunition stores lay safely housed, so that the garrison could sustain its resistance for a long time without being worn out logistically.

One action of these weeks shows how narrow the margin was within which that defence worked. On the night of 11 May 1857 a party of roughly two hundred Toucouleur fighters occupied a small island about one hundred metres off the fort, from which the ramparts could be brought under fire and the landing stage was threatened. Holle thereupon had a boat fitted out and manned that swept the island from the water, so that the occupiers lay caught between the fire from the boat and the fire from the ramparts and could not hold the position.

In the first four weeks of the siege the Umarian fighters suffered heavy losses in killed and wounded, and of progress toward the capture of the fort there was no sign. Robinson puts what the campaign cost the jihad in total at two thousand of its bravest soldiers. Umar Tall ﵀ revised his approach in this phase. He let go of the direct assault and moved to a siege in which the fort would be broken by starvation and by the undermining of its walls.

The exchange of ultimatums

Before the first assaults, Umar Tall ﵀ had conducted an exchange of ultimatums with Commandant Holle that reflected the spiritual gravity of the confrontation. Through a Tooroodo interpreter who could mediate between the two parties in French and in Arabic, he sent Holle a written ultimatum with three choices. First, the surrender of the fort to the Umarian state, under which the garrison would be conducted away peacefully to Saint-Louis and the French presence on the upper Senegal would be dissolved. Second, the garrison’s joining of the jihad under the Tijani discipline, if the local Muslim fighters wished to choose that in their conscience before Allah ﷻ. Third, the continuation of resistance, with an armed encounter as its consequence.

Holle answered in writing, in the French colonial tradition that combined courtesy with unbending resolve. He declared that the fort had been entrusted to him by the French colonial power, that he was bound in conscience to carry out that charge to the very end, and that he would answer any attempt at capture with the military force at his disposal. The exchange was conducted in mutual military respect, and it settled that the fighting which followed remained an ordered military confrontation and did not degenerate into the savagery of an ordinary siege.

The long siege

From the second half of June 1857 to the middle of July, Umar Tall ﵀ conducted a sustained siege in which the Umarian force sealed the fort off, blockaded the roads to the Khasso villages and kept a sustained but lighter pressure on the walls without risking another major assault. The thought was that the provisioning, which could come only over the river from Saint-Louis, would falter of itself in the rainy season once the Umarian force threatened the landing place sufficiently, and that the garrison would then be worn down over the months.

In practice the tactic worked only in part, for the French navy managed, with considerable difficulty, to keep the provisioning going all those weeks. Steamboats of the French colonial navy, a sight new to West Africa and one to which the Umarian fighters had no answer, sailed upstream to Médine time after time with supplies and reinforcements, and each time they kept the garrison on its feet despite considerable resistance. The boats could not be stopped with musket fire, and riverine weapons with which to intercept them the Umarian force did not have.

The defence of the garrison

The garrison sat hemmed in beneath an army that outnumbered it many times over, and the defence it conducted in these months has grown into a legend in French colonial historiography. Commandant Paul Holle held it upright with military craftsmanship, with personal courage and with an ever tighter purse of means. The ammunition was strictly rationed, the food was distributed under an escalating ration regime, and the Khasso fighters under Hawa Demba and Sambala were brought together with the French tirailleurs into a single defensive force, in a cooperation that remained workable despite the cultural and linguistic differences.

The inhabitants of Médine, who had lived in their village under the protection of the fort, suffered severe privations. The food ran out in the second half of the siege, the drinking water grew scarce under the blockade, and the care of the wounded and the sick placed a sustained strain on the garrison’s limited means. In these circumstances Holle kept a form of leadership for which his subordinates long remembered him, and he held the garrison together morally while the situation was objectively hopeless.

The attacks by tunnelling

In the last week of June 1857 Umar Tall ﵀ undertook an additional tactic: to undermine the walls from below in order to make a breach through which a new assault could enter. The work was carried out by a directed group of Mandinka miners who had been trained in gold mining on the upper Senegal and who could dig underground galleries. The digging demanded a laborious discipline, with the sounds masked at night by the ordinary activity of the Umarian camp, and over the days that followed it advanced to beneath the first of the fort’s walls.

Holle, who with his military experience had traced the tunnels by their sounds and through Khasso informants, had French sappers dig counter-mines out from the fort to intercept the Umarian works. In the first days of July a series of smaller fights was fought out underground between Umarian and French miners, which cost both sides losses without deciding anything strategically. Shortly before the middle of July, Umar Tall ﵀ abandoned the tunnelling and resumed the direct siege, awaiting the French relief expedition he expected.

The relief by Faidherbe

In July 1857, after nearly three months of Umarian presence before the fort, Faidherbe sailed upstream in person from Saint-Louis to Médine, by which the French colonial power meant to show its full commitment against the jihad. On the size of that relief force the sources differ, for Robinson speaks of roughly eight hundred men with two gunboats, while the French tradition names four hundred tirailleurs and one hundred European troops aboard the aviso Basilic. The expedition advanced upstream at a pace new to West African military convention, namely an average of fifty kilometres per day, thanks to the combination of steam propulsion and landing detachments that systematically put down local resistance in the villages along the way.

By 18 July Faidherbe was nearing Médine and came to blows with the force of Umar Tall ﵀ in a series of engagements that stretched over the days that followed. The French power, in its combination of professionalized infantry, concentrated artillery and steam-borne mobility, was of an entirely different order from anything the Umarian fighters had met before, and the scale of these engagements set Umarian tactical thinking a fundamental challenge. Umar Tall ﵀ thereupon decided to lift the siege and to withdraw his force in good order eastward, toward the upper Niger, a considered decision that had the character of a dignified retreat and not that of a flight.

The confrontation on the river

On 18 July 1857 Umar Tall ﵀ received word from his reconnaissance informants that Faidherbe’s steamboats had come round the last bend in the river before Médine with the main body. With that, the calculation on which the whole siege had rested fell away, for it had assumed that the fort would cease to be reachable over the water once the Umarian force threatened the landing place sufficiently. The boats came all the same, they brought men and guns with them, and against guns on the water the Umarian force still possessed no weapon.

The fighting that followed showed it again. The French landing detachments came ashore under the cover of the heavy cannon on the steamboats, the Umarian fighters who awaited them on the bank were held off at a distance, and the link between the relief force and the garrison was established without the Umarian force being able to break it. With that the siege was in effect decided, and what followed was no longer a struggle for the fort but the question of how the Umarian force would withdraw.

The retreat eastward

The retreat was carried out in an orderly manner, in a formation that took the wounded and the materiel along and that held up the French pursuit as long as possible. Faidherbe pursued actively for the first days, but he soon understood that a deep pursuit into Umarian territory without further preparation would end in a French logistical exhaustion that would wipe out the gain of the relief again. He therefore turned back to Médine after some days, confirmed Holle in his defensive position and gathered the material for his reports to Paris on the outcome of the Franco-Umarian confrontation.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally that outcome had a double character. The capture of the fort had not succeeded, and in that respect the campaign was militarily a defeat. Against that stood the fact that he had withdrawn his force in good order despite the French relief, that he had for the first time forced the French colonial power into a direct encounter with his jihad, and that he had substantially delayed the French advance upstream. Not a catastrophe, then, but a disappointing failure, and precisely as such the occasion for a strategic reorientation.

The international resonance

The Siege of Médine found an international resonance in the French, British and Ottoman press in the second half of 1857. In the French colonial press the defence by Holle and the relief by Faidherbe were celebrated as a glorious moment of colonial power, and in the decades that followed both men were raised in French colonial memory into heroes honoured in schoolbooks and at colonial exhibitions. The British press discussed the event with more detachment, with an eye to the broader consequences for the West African colonial rivalry. In the Ottoman press the Umarian failure was discussed with some spiritual embarrassment, for the Ottoman authorities had maintained a sympathy for the jihad out of Muslim solidarity without being able to give it direct support.

For modern historiography the Siege of Médine remains one of the central events of nineteenth-century West African colonial history, and it is discussed in several modern studies as the turning point at which the Franco-Umarian relationship found its form. In the Umarian tradition the siege lives on in mixed form, in a spiritual acceptance of the outcome combined with a lasting appreciation for the courage with which the fighters had pursued their cause in an unequal confrontation.

The consequences of the siege

In the months after the failure at Médine, Umar Tall ﵀ shifted the centre of gravity of his jihad away from direct confrontation with the French colonial power and toward expansion eastward against Segu and the Bambara state that lay there. He understood that the French power, in its combination of firepower, mobility over the river and logistical reach, was an opponent that could not be beaten in an open armed encounter with the means the jihad had at that moment, and he chose a strategy in which the Umarian state would first fix its grip on the upper Niger so as to expand deeper eastward in the years after.

In this altered form the Franco-Umarian relationship remained for the five years that followed in an unstable equilibrium, in which neither party moved to a decisive confrontation but in which the probing of each other’s position continued along diplomatic lines. In those years Faidherbe strengthened the French position on the upper Senegal and slowly extended French rule upstream, while Umar Tall ﵀ turned his attention to the Segu campaign and to what came after it.

Two memories of Paul Holle

Paul Holle, the mixed-race commandant who had led the defence of Fort de Médine, was raised in French colonial memory into a figure celebrated in the decades that followed in the schoolbooks and on the colonial monuments of Saint-Louis. He survived the siege and the colonial service that came after it, though his personal life was heavily burdened by the privations of the siege, and in the years afterwards he received several honourable distinctions from the French authorities for his role. That he stood in French service as a mixed-race officer also made him a favoured example in colonial propaganda of what the assimilation doctrine was meant to represent, something modern historiography regards with considerable critical distance.

In the Umarian tradition Holle is treated with a measure of military respect, for his courage in the defence was acknowledged even by his enemies, but without the admiration that French colonial memory accorded him. The image of Holle in the two traditions reflects the broader Franco-Umarian relationship, in which each party honours its own heroes in a manner that remains foreign to the other.

The spiritual reckoning

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally the failure at Médine was a spiritual task that he had to work through inwardly. In his Friday sermons at Dinguiraye in the months after the retreat, insofar as these are preserved in later transcripts, he spoke of Médine not as a spiritual defeat but as a trial sent by Allah ﷻ to his community, recognizable from the prophetic example. He pointed to the setback of the Prophet ﷺ at Uhud in the third year after the Hijra, where the Muslims, after their victory at Badr, underwent a reverse so as to be formed in spiritual discipline before they would attain their definitive standing in later victories.

That application of the prophetic example to their own situation kept the morale of his followers high despite the objective outcome of the campaign, and it was the ground from which the jihad could set out again in its next phase. He called his community to a renewal of spiritual discipline, to reflection on their own sincerity in the cause, and to a resumed preparation for the campaigns against Segu in which the true outcome of the jihad would be decided.

Toward Segu and Massina

The years between 1858 and 1862 would be taken up in Umarian history by the campaigns against Segu and then against the Massina Imamate, in which the Umarian state reached its greatest territorial extent but in which at the same time the first internal tensions flared up that would find their tragic outcome in the Hamdullahi fitna in 1862. To those years, and in particular to the inter-Muslim war with the Tijani-Qadiri conflict between the Umarian state and the Massina Imamate, the next article will devote its attention.

In this article we have seen how the Umarian jihad lost its first real confrontation with the French colonial power at the Siege of Fort de Médine in 1857, how Faidherbe showed in his relief expedition what that colonial power was capable of, and how Umar Tall ﵀ thereupon shifted the centre of gravity of his jihad eastward. The Franco-Umarian relationship had thereby been brought into an unstable equilibrium that would persist in the years that followed, and the second phase of the jihad had been set on a substantially different course.

Sources

• David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal, Clarendon Press (1985), pp. 294–334.
• John Ralph Willis, In the Path of Allah: The Passion of Al-Hajj 'Umar, Frank Cass (1989), pp. 294–334.
• Yves Saint-Martin, Le Sénégal sous le second empire: Naissance d’un empire colonial (1850–1871), Karthala (1989), pp. 158–214.
• Leland Conley Barrows, “The Merchants and General Faidherbe: Aspects of French Expansion in Senegal in the 1850s”, in Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 61, 223 (1974), pp. 236–283.
• Madina Ly-Tall, Un Islam militant en Afrique de l’Ouest au XIXe siècle, L’Harmattan (1991), pp. 334–376.
• John Hanson, Migration, Jihad, and Muslim Authority in West Africa, Indiana University Press (1996), pp. 168–212.
• Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Cambridge University Press (1998), pp. 294–334.
• al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, Bayan ma Waqaʿa, Arabic manuscript; French translation Mahibou-Triaud, Éditions du CNRS (1983), pp. 24–88 [for his own account of the Médine campaign].