The Siege of Fort de Médine

Through the first months of 1857 both sides made ready for the same collision. At Saint-Louis, Governor Faidherbe sent arms, ammunition and men up the Senegal by steamer week after week, and held several hundred tirailleurs in the town at raised readiness so that a relief expedition could sail at the first sign of an attack. At Dinguiraye, al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀ called a general mobilisation through every settlement of the Umarian state, fixed the shape of the operation with his commanders, and spent days fasting and in prayer before it. Between the two stood a French fort the better part of a thousand kilometres up the river, on the ground that decided whether the jihad could move on Segou at all.

That April the Umarian army moved out of Dinguiraye: about twenty thousand men in its full strength by the French reckoning and fifteen thousand by David Robinson’s, a core of talibé fighters with muskets around an expanded body of Tooroodo, Fulbe and Mandinka levies raised in the campaigns of the preceding years. Umar Tall ﵀ commanded in person, with his son Ahmadu and Alfa Umar Cherno Baila ﵀ under him. The march was made in stages, with halts to prepare the assault and to gather smaller Mandinka allies who joined on the way. On 20 April 1857 the army stood in front of Fort de Médine and the battle was joined. Before the first assault Umar Tall ﵀ sent Commandant Holle a written ultimatum with three choices: hand over the fort and be escorted safely to Saint-Louis, join the jihad if the Muslim soldiers of the garrison chose it for themselves, or fight. Holle answered in writing that the fort had been entrusted to him, that he was bound in conscience to hold it to the end, and that he would answer any attempt with what force he had.

Through May and into June the Umarian army went at the walls in waves of several thousand men at a time, trying to overwhelm the defence by weight. The tactic had carried every previous campaign. Here it met guns on bastions laid to cross their fire over the approaches, and tirailleurs firing down from the parapet at a rate matched nowhere else in West Africa, and stores in casemates that meant the garrison could not be exhausted quickly. One attempt was made on the water: on the night of 11 May about two hundred Toucouleur occupied a small island roughly a hundred metres off the fort, and Holle sent out a fortified boat and caught them in crossfire. In these weeks the Umarian army lost about two thousand of its bravest soldiers, which is David Robinson’s figure and not a French estimate, and the fort was no nearer falling. Umar Tall ﵀ stopped the assaults and changed method: the fort would be starved and undermined instead of stormed.

From June into July the siege became a blockade. The roads between the fort and the Khasso villages were cut, light pressure was kept on the walls, and the plan was that the rains would do the rest: if the Umarian army could make the landing dangerous enough, the fort would slowly be starved out. It worked only in part. The French navy kept the fort supplied all summer. Steamers came upriver again and again, a thing new to West Africa and one the Umarian army had no answer to, and each run kept the garrison alive. Muskets could not stop a steamer, and there was nothing else to stop it with. Inside the walls the people of Médine, who had lived under the fort’s protection, ran short of food and then of water.

With the assaults given up Umar Tall ﵀ tried the ground instead. A party of Mandinka miners, men trained in the gold workings of the upper Senegal, began driving a gallery toward the eastern wall to bring it down from underneath and open a breach. The digging was disciplined, and the sound of it was covered at night by the ordinary noise of the camp. Holle, an experienced officer, picked the work up through the sound and through Khasso informants, and set French pioneers digging counter-galleries out from the fort to intercept it. The two sets of miners met, and there was a series of small fights underground that cost both sides men and settled nothing. The mining was abandoned and the siege went back to waiting, now for the French relief column that everybody knew was coming.

In the middle of July, after nearly three months of Umarian presence in front of the fort, Faidherbe came up the river himself. Robinson puts the relief at about eight hundred men and two gunboats; the French tradition gives four hundred tirailleurs and a hundred European troops aboard the sloop Basilic, with the artillery and the steamers to carry it. Steam and landing parties together moved the column at about fifty kilometres a day, a pace West African campaigning had not seen. On 18 July the boats came round the last bend below Médine, and their arrival resolved the stalemate: the fort was relieved, and an army that had not taken it in three months could not go on sitting in front of it. Umar Tall ﵀ lifted the siege and withdrew east in good order, bringing his wounded and his materiel with him. Faidherbe followed for a few days, understood what a deep pursuit into Umarian country would cost him, and turned back to Médine.

Médine was not a catastrophe and it was not a victory. The fort had not been taken, and in that sense the campaign was a defeat: the first the Umarian jihad had suffered. But the army came away in order, it had met the colonial power directly for the first time, and it had slowed the French advance upriver considerably. What changed was the direction. Umar Tall ﵀ understood that French firepower, river mobility and logistics could not be beaten with what he had, and turned his jihad east, toward Segou and the Bambara state on the upper Niger. In his Friday sermons at Dinguiraye in the months after the withdrawal he set the outcome beside Uhud: a reverse sent to a community after a victory, to form it before what came next. The campaigns of 1858 to 1862 followed from that decision, and so, in the end, did the fitna with the Masina imamate that ends this period.