An Atlantic revolution

In the early 1800s, a society of people found themselves in conflict with their rulers. Forced to pay taxes to support a wealthy minority, they felt economically oppressed. Those same people were also taking part in a growing, important exchange of ideas and new beliefs about politics, the world, and how to live. This new way of thinking offered the possibility of freedom from their oppression. Not surprisingly, the rulers of that society felt threatened by the new ideas and tried to outlaw them. However, the people found a leader who brought them together as an army, one that overthrew the old rulers and established a new form of government based on the ideas and beliefs they shared.

The paragraph above could be about revolutions in France, the United States, Haiti, or Latin America. However, it actually describes a revolution in West Africa, specifically in the region of northern Nigeria. The events above took place between 1804 and 1811, under the leadership of ‘Uthman dan Fodio. Yet historians hardly every mention it when they talk about the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as an age of revolution.

I’m here to suggest that this should change—but you should decide for yourself. I’ll describe some revolutions that happened in West Africa and the ways they differ from revolutions in the Americas and Europe. Because despite these differences, I believe events in West Africa were as much a part of the changes sweeping across the Atlantic Ocean region as the Haitian Revolution and French Revolution were. Read on and see if you agree with me!

The Atlantic economy — West African wing

Let’s start by talking about the economic connections. An increase in trade across the Atlantic led to the growth of a wealthy merchant class and a poor working class in both Europe and the Americas. Historians tell us that these trends helped lead to revolution in those regions. In France, for example, merchants’ increasing wealth led them to demand more power. Something similar happened in the Spanish Americas, where wealthy settlers wanted more say in how their colonies were run. Meanwhile, European peasants and enslaved Africans in the Americas were key participants in revolutions, partly because they were denied the wealth others were getting. In Haiti, for example, the poverty and mistreatment experienced by enslaved people was a big reason for the successful slave revolution in the late 1700s.

In West Africa, Atlantic trade had also enriched some and impoverished others. Particularly in ports like Gorée Island and coastal states like Benin, where rulers, merchants, and aristocrats grew wealthy by trading with Europeans. These groups were less powerful in the West African interior, although they emerged there as well. The wealthy sold gold, gum from acacia trees,¹ and enslaved people to Europe.

West African rulers also collected taxes from their people to fund wars that helped them expand their territory and to capture people to sell to European slavers. To keep such a state up and running, a lot of money is needed, and much of it is made by taxing people. This system, which is sometimes called the “fiscal-military” state, looks a lot like Europe at this time. Throughout the eighteenth century, France, Britain, and other European states were also increasing taxes to support their armed forces and wage war on each other. This matters to our analysis of revolution. After all, it was increased taxation that helped spark both the French and American Revolutions.

The fiscal-military state system caused deeper problems in West Africa than in Europe. That’s because this kind of trade and taxation were particularly bad for the economies of West African countries. You see, West Africans tended to export goods like gold and copper that were important for keeping economies strong. This meant that West Africa ended up with fewer of those goods, while Europe was building up their supply of them. More important, West African societies were losing people, their most important resource, to the transatlantic slave trade. In exchange, wealthy West African rulers and aristocrats imported luxuries such as alcohol. These luxury items were not good for growing the local economy. West African economies were gradually losing strength against European economies, which caused even more suffering.

Jihad as revolution

As in other parts of the Atlantic, West Africans who were not from the ruling class looked for a unifying force to help them confront oppression. Europeans found their spark in Enlightenment. It is a cultural movement that began in the late 1700s that emphasized individualism and reason over tradition. However, Enlightenment ideas didn’t spread widely in West Africa.² Instead, West Africans turned to another set of ideas that were increasingly powerful as a force of liberation—Islam. The religion had entered West Africa from North Africa as early as the eleventh century via rulers and traders. Over time, West African intellectuals developed a form of Islam that appealed to a growing number of people.

Islam became a revolutionary force in West Africa because it offered many attractive ideas to people who were not part of the elite. First, although Islam technically allows slavery, it forbids the sale of Muslims as enslaved people. Therefore, many saw that converting to Islam might prevent them from becoming enslaved themselves. Second, Islam came to West Africa with a set of laws, and those laws included rules that restricted the power of rulers over their people. Third, the pattern of Islam followed in West Africa promoted education and learning for everyone. This model of Islam also respected some older beliefs, which made it easier for locals to adopt. Finally, Islam forbids the consumption of alcohol. This was one of the main goods imported by (and almost exclusively consumed by) their oppressive rulers.

People found they could use this form of Islam as a shared set of ideas to overturn the rule of wealthy groups involved in the slave trade and high taxation. They launched military campaigns to overthrow their rulers. These were revolutions, and they were also referred to as jihad— an Arabic word meaning “struggle” or “effort.”

The first of these jihad-revolutions was launched in Senegal in the 1670s. Rulers of then-states like Waalo and Jolof were raiding their own and each other’s communities to enslave people. A Muslim man, Naṣīr al-Dīn, led an uprising of peasants and herders who overthrew their rulers and stopped those raids for a while.

In 1727, a similar jihad broke out in the highlands of modern-day Guinea. Herders overthrew the military and merchant elite and established the Muslim state of Fuuta Jalon. This revolution took a long time and was only really completed in 1776 (familiar year, folks?). In the 1790s, another revolutionary Muslim state emerged in Senegal called Fuuta Toro. In both the revolutions in Fuuta Jalon and Fuuta Toro, the leaders were mostly cattle herders who had been among the most highly taxed and enslaved people of their regions.

In 1804, one of the last great revolutionary jihads broke out. The transatlantic slave trade was expanding during this period, and Europeans were trying to buy captives in the Benin and Biafra regions (in what is today Nigeria). Many of these people were herders and farmers who were enslaved in the West African interior as the result of a series of wars. A number of the communities suffering from these wars and enslavement turned to Islam which, as mentioned earlier, forbade the sale of Muslims as slaves. One leader of these communities, ‘Uthman dan Fodio, criticized the local rulers. He spoke out against them for extreme taxation of the people, for corruption, and for enslaving and selling Muslims. He rallied many other vulnerable communities and launched a revolution that created one of the largest states in West African history. Known as the Sokoto Caliphate, it existed between 1804 and 1903.

How revolutionary were these West African states? Well, many did increase access to education among the population. And in many regions there was political reform in which the powers of the ruler were restricted by Islamic law and the growth of a system of Islamic courts. In general, these states also lowered or even stopped participation in the transatlantic slave trade, protecting at least free-born Muslims from enslavement. Still, as in Europe and the Americas, there were limits to the revolution. In reality, the new governments often still taxed at a very high rate, and often they continued to allow some form of slavery.

Nevertheless, in the opinion of this historian, the new West African states were revolutionary in a similar way to the Americas and Europe at this time. Across the Atlantic, the wealth was shifting to a class engaged in trade. In addition, people laboring for little or no pay were growing angry and resentful. These revolutionaries were driven by an ideology that promised reform and liberation. Even though the actual results of the revolution were limited, they were similar to other Atlantic revolutions. What does your inner historian say? Should ‘Uthman dan Fodio’s revolution make the list?

1 An important raw material for printing patterns on textiles.

2 In part, this was because of the language barrier—few West Africans spoke French or English. In part, it was because those ideas weren’t really that attractive or familiar to West Africans.