Jihad and State-building in late Nineteenth Century Upper Volta: The Rise and Fall of the Marka state of Al- Kari of Boussé

Abstract

One of the most persuasive elements in the history of the Western Sudan in the nineteenth century is the emergence of Muslim empire-builders. Initially, the most successful of these men were Fulbe theocrats. In recent years deserved attention has been paid to Uthman dan Fodio in Nigeria, to Shaykh Ahmad in Massina, and to Al-Hajj 'Umar Tal.1 Especially in the latter half of the century, however, the Fulbe precedent for creating revivalist theocracies was married to the pragmatic idea of empire-building through the utilization of modern firearms, and these two themes came to be reflected in the activities of non-Fulbe West Africans as well. Increasingly too, the revivalist aspect of empire came to take second place to the more immediate goal of creating a new nexus of political and military power. But it is probably no coincidence that both well known and obscure state-builders continued to be Muslim, even if many were not Fulbe. For Islam provided a valuable social cement in new states, and also offered new imperial administrations the benefits of long-distance trading and communications systems, controlled by Muslim merchants. While European firearms provided these empire-builders with the means of carving out new political empires, these weapons were ultimately the harbingers of a European military imperialism in the Western Sudan. Europeans possessed an even greater military advantage in West Africa since they not only had the new weapons, but also controlled the source of production and supply, and had an ideological motivation of their own prompting them to use this military precocity in pursuit of their own imperial ambitions. In West Africa of the late nineteenth century, the arrival in substantial amounts of European weapons coincided closely with the coming of European armies of conquest. Thus West African empire-builders virtually from the