West Africa in the Age of Revolutions

An Atlantic revolution

At the very beginning of the nineteenth century, a society of people found themselves in conflict with their rulers. Forced to pay taxes to support the lifestyles of a wealthy few, 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 people the possibility of liberation from their oppression. Not surprisingly, the rulers of that society felt threatened by the new ideas and tried to outlaw them. But 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.

Pop quiz: The paragraph above describes a revolution that resulted in new and revolutionary forms of government in which of these places? a) Haiti, b) France, c) the United States, d) several Latin American nations. OK, it’s really one of those “all of the above” situations, and yet none of those answers is the revolution I was talking about in that first paragraph. This story also describes events in West Africa, specifically in the region of northern Nigeria, between 1804 and 1811, under the leadership of ‘Uthman dan Fodio.

Many famous historians have described the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as an age of revolution. They paired the revolutions in France and the United States, and later included the Haitian Revolution (maybe the most revolutionary of them all!) and rebellions in the Spanish-ruled American colonies, as evidence of changes that were sweeping across the Atlantic Ocean region in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. West Africa is part of the Atlantic world, isn’t it? So why is it that ‘Uthman dan Fodio’s revolution never seems to make those famous historians’ lists?

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. Of course, the context and inspiration for these revolutions were somewhat different from revolutions in the Americas and Europe. But then, each of those revolutions also had its unique qualities. Despite these differences, I believe events in West Africa were as much a part of the Atlantic trends as the Haitian 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. The growth of 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 weren’t allowed to have any part of the wealth others were amassing. In Haiti, for example, the poverty and mistreatment experienced by enslaved people was a big reason for the successful slave revolution.

In West Africa, as well, Atlantic trade had similarly enriched some and impoverished others. Particularly in ports like Gorée Island and coastal states like Benin, the ruler and a few 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 Arabic,¹ and enslaved people in exchange for European luxury goods. West African rulers collected taxes from their people to fund wars, which they waged to expand their territory and to capture neighboring people to sell to European slavers.

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 wage war on each other. This matters to our analysis of revolution. Remember, it was increased taxation that helped spark both the French and American Revolutions.

The fiscal-military state system caused even deeper problems in West Africa than in Europe, because this sort of trade and taxation was particularly bad for the economies of West African countries. You see, West Africans tended to export commodities like gold and copper that were important for keeping economies strong. So, West Africa ended up with fewer of those commodities, while Europe was building up their supply of them, partly by importing them from their American colonies. More important, West African societies were losing people, their most important resource, to the Atlantic slave trade. In exchange, wealthy West African rulers and aristocrats imported luxuries such as alcohol, which were not good for growing the local economy. So, 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 African commoners looked for ideas and a unifying force to help them confront this economic oppression. Europeans found their spark in the Enlightenment concept of sovereignty. However, Enlightenment ideas didn’t spread widely in West Africa.² Of course, there were some West Africans— especially in the French-speaking ports of Senegal—who shared and discussed Enlightenment ideas, but they were relatively few.

Instead of embracing the Enlightenment, West Africans turned to another set of ideas that were increasingly powerful as a force of liberation in the area—Islam. Islam had entered West Africa from North Africa as early as the eleventh century, mainly as a religion of rulers and traders. But West African intellectuals gradually developed a form of Islam that was very appealing to common people.

Islam became a revolutionary force in West Africa because it offered many attractive ideas to the common people of that region. First, although Islam technically allows slavery, it forbids the sale of Muslims as slaves. Therefore, many saw that converting to Islam and expanding Islam in West Africa might provide an escape from the constant threat of being enslaved. 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, even for commoners. At the same time, this model of Islam also respected some older beliefs, which made it easier for locals to adopt. Finally, Islam forbids alcohol, which was one of the main goods imported by (and almost exclusively consumed by) their oppressive rulers.

Common 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, high taxation, and other oppressive practices. They launched military campaigns to overthrow their rulers. These were revolutions, and they were also jihad—an Arabic word meaning struggle against enemies.

The first of these jihad-revolutions was launched in Senegal in the 1670s, where rulers of states like Waalo and Jolof were raiding their own and each other’s communities to enslave people. A Muslim man, Nasīr al-Dīn, led an uprising of peasants and herders who overthrew their rulers and stopped those raids for a while. Nasīr al-Dīn’s army was eventually defeated, but some members of his army moved to other regions, where they tried again.

In 1727, a similar jihad broke out in the highlands of modern-day Guinea, where 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 Atlantic slave trade was expanding during this period, and Europeans were trying to buy many captives in the Bight of Benin and Biafra regions—in what is today Nigeria. Many of these people were herders and farmers who were enslaved in the 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 for their 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—the Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903).

How revolutionary were these states? Well, many of them did increase education among the population. There was, in many regions, 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 halted participation in the Atlantic 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, they were revolutionary in a similar way to the revolutions in the Americas and Europe at this time. They were the product of a connected economic environment across the Atlantic—the shifting of wealth to a class engaged in trade combined with the anger and resentment of people laboring for little or no pay. They 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.