The Battle of Noukouma

In the wet season the inland delta of the Niger becomes something close to an inland sea, some forty thousand square kilometres of creeks, wild rice and sandbanks that go under in June and come back in February. Djenné had taught Islamic law there for five centuries and paid tribute for it to the Bamana faama of Ségou, whose inspectors rode in every year to collect. The Fulani ulama of the delta held that this was the price of quiet. A scholar from Malangal in Fittouga, Ahmad ibn Muhammad Lobbo, whom the country called Seku Amadu ﵀, held that it was humiliation, and he had already sent to Sokoto for a flag.

The break came out of a killing at the market of Simay, and the two surviving accounts of it run in opposite directions. What is not in doubt is what followed: in January 1818 Seku Amadu ﵀ called in his students, his family clans and the herders of the Fittouga mounds, and gathered about a thousand men on a plain near Noukouma. Ardo Amadu Gourori, the local Fulani ruler who paid tribute to Ségou, appealed over their heads to the faama, and Ségou answered with horse, with firearms and with contingents from Bobo, Monimpé and Kounari.

On the morning of Saturday 21 March 1818, 13 Jumada al-Awwal 1233, the coalition came onto the plain from the east and formed against the marsh at Pogôna. Not all of it was there. Contingents were still coming up the road behind, and the commanders in front did not wait for them, because a thousand men with spears did not look like something worth waiting for. In front of the coalition lay ground that read as open plain and was not.

The charge went in across ground that had held a flood four months earlier. Hooves broke the crust, the horses went in to the fetlock and then past it, and a line of cavalry at speed turned into a line of animals standing still while their riders tried to get them out. Behind them the rest of the coalition was still on firm ground and could not come through. This is the whole battle. Everything else is what men did with the twenty minutes the mud gave them.

Seku Amadu ﵀ sent the spearmen forward into the mired vanguard, and the forty horse went with them. The coalition broke, not gradually but at once, and turned east and north-east toward Yéri. Its own losses were counted in hundreds of riders and the jama’a’s were small. To the men who had gathered on that plain in January it looked like a signum, a confirmation that Allah ﷻ favoured their cause, and the whole later history of the Diina is built on what they concluded that morning.

The war did not stop with the battle. Bâ and Daget follow it to Yéri on 13 April, to Dotala on 28 April, and as far as Saro on 12 May, and only then did the delta start changing hands on its own. Djenné opened its gates without a siege, glad to be rid of the tribute, and Mopti, Tenenkou and Dia declared one after another. In 1820 Seku Amadu ﵀ refused to live in Djenné and began building a capital from the ground up, named so that its name would be a prayer, governed through a council of forty scholars who could call the amir al-mu’minin himself to account.