Africa

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North Africa to the 1870s

By the final decade of the 18th century Africans had survived several centuries of outside interference and remained largely in control of their own destinies. Ottoman control over North Africa had declined in the face of increasing European dominance of Mediterranean Sea trade. For the most part, Egypt and the coastal settlements and ports of the Maghreb acted independently of central Ottoman authority. To the west, Morocco remained an independent kingdom, but the king’s power did not extend far beyond Morocco’s major cities.

In the desert regions to the south, trans-Saharan caravans continued to ply their trade between the southern savanna lands, the salt mines and oases of the desert, and the Mediterranean world. However, the scale of trans-Saharan trade had declined considerably from its height in the 16th century. This was largely due to the rising importance of European seaborne trade along the West African coast.

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Egypt and Sudan

French general Napoleon Bonaparte invaded and conquered Ottoman Egypt in 1798. The Ottomans retook Egypt in 1801, but the French invasion sparked important changes in the province. A key figure in the Ottoman reconquest was Muhammad Ali, leader of an Albanian regiment of the Ottoman army. The French invasion had weakened the old Egyptian Mamluk aristocracy and Muhammad Ali seized the opportunity to establish himself as the ruler of Egypt. The position was recognized by Ottoman sultan Selim III, who awarded Ali the title pasha (viceroy) in 1805.

Determined to establish his own dynasty in Egypt, Muhammad Ali built a professional army to withstand any future foreign invasions. Soldiers were conscripted from the peasantry and from slaves brought north from Sudan. Muhammad Ali ordered the massacre of most of the leading Mamluks and took over their tax-collecting powers. Then he set up a professional civil service, whose principal role was to reap as much tax income from peasant farmers as possible. To this end, his new civil servants directed the rebuilding of irrigation canals and introduced modern agricultural methods to the peasantry. Egypt’s peasant farmers produced cotton and wheat in huge quantities, and the state took a large portion of the harvest in the form of taxes and exported it to Europe.

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In the 1820s Muhammad Ali sent an army to invade and occupy the upper Nile. The army conquered the Funj sultanate and established the administrative capital of Khartoum at the junction of the Blue Nile and the White Nile. By the 1840s Ali had extended Egypt’s empire to include most of what is now southern Sudan. Rich in ivory and slaves, this area was a good source of wealth and of forced recruits for the Egyptian army. The Arab Egyptian merchants who set up their headquarters in Khartoum, using what were in effect private armies, chose to raid southern Sudanese settlements of Dinka, Shilluk, and Nuer peoples for goods rather than trade for them. In doing so they established a pattern and frame of mind for the relationship between Sudan’s Arabs and black Africans that was to persist all the way into the 21st century.

Muhammad Ali’s grandson Ismail Pasha, who ruled from 1863 to 1879, allowed European traders to settle in Egypt. Ismail encouraged Europeans to invest in the construction of railways and also in the digging of a canal to link the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea at Suez. France financed the construction of the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869. Egyptian cotton production for the British market increased rapidly during the American Civil War (1861-1865), when cotton supplies from the United States were cut off. Overconfident of Egypt’s economic position, Ismail began undertaking costly endeavors such as building a railway to Khartoum and investing heavily in garrisons in southern Sudan to suppress Sudanese resistance.

By the mid-1870s it was clear that Ismail’s government had overstretched itself and was bankrupt. Britain and France—fearful that the Egyptian state might collapse and they would lose their huge investments in railways and canal—intervened, deposing Ismail in 1879. The two European powers established a system of “dual control” over Egypt’s finances. When an Egyptian army coup threatened to drive out the Europeans, Britain sent an army of occupation and took over sole control of Egypt in 1882.

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Algeria and the Maghreb

The rulers of Algeria supported the French in their 1798 invasion of Egypt and supplied Napoleon’s army with wheat, on credit, throughout the subsequent Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815). Thereafter, however, the French refused to repay their debt to Algeria and relations between them soured. In 1830 the French army occupied Algiers and overthrew the Algerian ruler. France annexed Algiers and the fertile coastal region in 1834 and invited in French settlers to occupy the land. Beyond the coastal regions, however, the French met the formidable resistance of Arab and Berber Muslims, led by marabout (Muslim holy man) Abd al-Qadir. By the 1840s the French needed an army in excess of 100,000 men to maintain their occupation and to wage the ongoing war. Although Abd al-Qadir was captured in 1847, French conquest of Algeria was not completed until the 1870s.

In the early 19th century the rulers of Libya and Tunisia, acting independently of Ottoman control, bought firearms from Britain and used them to extend their control into the interior regions of the Sahara. Libya took control of the Fezzan region in 1811 and thereafter stepped up the trade in slaves from the Bornu region by Lake Chad. The kingdom of Morocco maintained its independence throughout the 19th century, despite clashes with Spain along the Spanish-controlled northern coast and with France on the Algerian border. At the same time the Moroccan sultans extended more effective control over the remoter Berber regions of the interior.

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West Africa to the 1870s

From the 17th to the 19th century in sub-Saharan West Africa—from the Sénégal River estuary in the west to Cameroon in the east and as far south as Angola—political and economic life was dominated by the demands of the European-controlled Atlantic slave trade. By the late 18th century the scale of this trade had reached unprecedented heights, with up to 100,000 captives exported every year. The wars that generated this traffic in captives dominated life in the interior. States with standing armies became more centralized and more powerful, dominating smaller, village-based communities. For the most part, European presence was confined to coastal fortresses, which were fortified against European rivals rather than local Africans. Coastal African rulers tolerated the European presence because the European fortresses provided useful trading links that strengthened their positions against their own African rivals.

Two important developments occurred in 18th-century West Africa that presaged large-scale change in the 19th century. First, by the mid-18th century a rise in Islamic reformist zeal led to several jihads and the establishment of new Islamic states in Fouta Djallon (in what is now Guinea) and Fouta Toro (in Senegal). Second, in the 1780s and 1790s Britain helped freed slaves from Britain and North America establish settlements in the British territory of Sierra Leone. The Islamic states of Fouta Djallon and Fouta Toro served as inspirations for larger 19th-century West African jihads, while the colony of Sierra Leone was symbolic of the emerging abolitionist movement that would eventually bring an end to the Atlantic slave trade.

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Jihads and New States in 19th-Century West Africa

West African Islamic reformist ideas of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were spread by Fulani peoples, who had played a prominent role in the earlier jihads of Fouta Djallon and Futa Toro. The Fulani—largely Muslim cattle herders who lived in the savanna lands from Senegal to Cameroon—typically lived in peace among farming populations. However, in the Hausa region of what is now northern Nigeria the Fulani became estranged from what they regarded as the corrupt rule of the nominally Muslim Hausa aristocracy. They particularly resented the Hausa’s heavy taxation of their cattle. The Fulani were therefore very receptive to the reformist teachings of Muslim scholar Usuman dan Fodio, who had begun his preaching as a young man in the 1770s in the Hausa city-state of Gobir.

By the early 1800s Usuman had accumulated a considerable following. In 1804 the ruler of Gobir sent his cavalry to capture or kill Usuman, but the force was defeated by his followers. This military action sparked a spontaneous revolutionary movement among Fulani and other oppressed Muslims across the whole of Hausaland. Within four years most of the Hausa city-states had fallen to the jihad. After Usuman’s death in 1817 his brother Abdullahi and son Muhammad Bello united the Hausa states into a single Islamic empire, with its capital at Sokoto. This brought an end to centuries of rivalry and clashes between the states. By the time of Muhammad Bello’s death in 1837 this Sokoto Caliphate stretched across the whole of northern Nigeria and was the largest West African state since 16th-century Songhai. Islam and Sharia (Islamic law) made up the unifying elements in what was otherwise a federation of semiautonomous emirates. Literacy became widespread and, with an end to inter-state Hausa wars, trade flourished. Those who benefited least were the Hausa peasantry, who had in effect changed one oppressive master for another.

Fulani pastoralists tried to extend the jihad into Bornu, but they were resisted by Muhammad al-Kanemi, a religious and military leader from Kanem. Although the state lost control of its eastern Hausa provinces, Bornu retained its independence under a new dynasty set up by al-Kanemi’s son Umar.

West of Sokoto, Usuman dan Fodio’s revolution inspired further Fulani-led jihads and political change. On the upper Niger River, a jihad was led by Umar Tal, a Muslim preacher from Fouta Toro. In the Fouta Djallon region, he built up an army and equipped it with firearms, bought in exchange for captives on the coast. From 1855 to 1862 Umar’s army captured the Bambara states of Kaarta and Ségou, and the Fulani state of Macina. He thus created what was known as the Tukolor Empire, which stretched from Fouta Djallon to Tombouctou. Following Umar’s death in 1864, Tukolor was weakened by internal revolts and was conquered by the French in 1893.

South of Tukolor, in what is now Guinea, military leader Samory Touré conquered and united the states of the Dyula people in the 1860s, creating the powerful Mandinka state. Unlike some of his contemporary state-builders, Samory was not a religious preacher and Mandinka was not a reformist state as such. Nevertheless, he used Islam to unite the nation, promoting Muslim education and basing his rule upon the Sharia. Samory’s professional army was the real strength of what had become a Mandinka empire by the 1880s. As such it provided one of the major forces of resistance to French conquest in the final decades of the century.

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