EL HADJ OMAR SAIDOU TALL

El Hadj Omar Saidou Tall (1797-1864), was an Islamic reformer and the man who introduced and spread the Tidjaniya brotherhood in Tropical West Africa.  

PHOTO CAPTION: El Hadj Omar Saidou Tall. SOURCE: EA Library

He was born about 1797 at Hallouaar, in the neighbourhood of Podor in Fouta-Toro, in Tuculor Land, the fourth son of the Torodo Marabout Saidou Tall.  He belonged through his family to the group of Tuculor Korobe (holy men) who had, few years earlier, overthrown the pagan Peul dynasty of the Deniauke and turned Fouta-Toro into a Moslem theocracy.

After receiving his religious education in his family, then at the mores of Oualata, he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He was then twenty-three, which places this event at about 1820. He stayed there for several years and was accepted into the Tidjaniya brotherhood by Muhammed al Ghali, a disciple of Tidjani. He returned with the mandate for the Sudan of the Caliph of the brotherhood.

The depth and extent of his knowledge earned for him the honour of the rulers through whose territories he passed – namely Kanemi, then master of Bornu, and Muhammad Bello, Emir of Sokoto, who gave him two of his daughters as legitimate wives. On the other hand, he was received rather coldly by the Peul king of Macina, Sekou Hamadou.

The pagan Bambara King of Segou, on his part, received, imprisoned and released him. El Hadj omar accused both the Peul and Bambara kings of attempting to assassinate him when he left their capitals. He settled for some time in the neighbourhood of Futa-Jallon, whose Almany gave him a favourable welcome. There, he set up a zaouia (religious and military community) at Diegounko.

In the years 1846-1848, El Hadu Omar made his first propaganda tour of his native land and received a rather cold welcome from the French Commandant of Bakel. The Almany of Fouta-Jallon prohibited him from reentering his territory, and El Hadj Omar settled in 1850 on the borders of this land, on independent Dialonke territory, where he built the Dinguiraye fortress. The growing hostility of the western Sudan rulers and the ruling classes of his native land, as well as that of the French colonisers, can be explained by the social, religious, and military powers, which the new brotherhood that he was spreading gave him.

In the Moslem brotherhoods, which had hitherto spread in West Africa, there were many mystical distinctions between the religious head and the ordinary congregation, and these constituted barriers, which could be crossed only by the privileged few of the traditional tribal aristocracy. Tidjaniya broke these barriers through the establishment of a direct contact between the ordinary followers and the khalif.

It gave everyone the opportunity to reach the top and break social and ethnic distinctions through military courage and Islamic learning. This gave a revolutionary democratic touch to the movement. This accounts for the success the brotherhood had with the oppressed sections of the traditional society (youth, women, and former captives) including those in the capital of the French establishment of Senegal, Saint-Louis. But from this also stems the resolute hostility of the established authorities and of the traditional cadres of the society towards El hadj Omar.

In Tuculor land where he was extremely popular, and where he later recruited the majority of his disciples and his troops, the traditional chiefs, with some few exceptions exhibited a hostility which always made it impossible for him to settle there. It was in 1852 that holy voice commanded him to wage a holy war in the words: “Sweep the country”.

Already a master of Boure, on the upper Niger, where gold mining gave him the means of getting arms from European slavers, he seized Bambouk (Upper Senegal) and attacked the animist monarchy of Coulibali-Massassi (Bambara kingdom of Kaarts) which he destroyed. The capital Nioro, fell in his hands in 1854. He then moved westwards against the Khaasa Moslem kingdom and tried to implant himself in his native land, Fouta-Toro. He again encountered the combined hostility of the traditional Moslem aristocracy whose social and political position he threatened and the French authorities who had settled among the river.

The extraordinary courage and faith with which his disciples faced the enemy proved unavailing before the French artillery. Owing to a lack of cannon, he failed before the half-caste Paul Holle (1857) of Saint-Louis. He retreated and settled at Gouemou on the right bank of the Senegal, but his small garrison fell in 1859 before the guns of the French troops.

Compelled to renounce the idea of conquering this area, El Hadj Omar then turned towards the East. The proximity of the coast and the support of slavers, combined with the possession of two pieces of artillery abandoned by the French (used by a Senegalese from Saint-Louis who had crossed over into his camp) gave him a clear superiority in arms over his opponents in the interior.

In January 1861 he crushed the coalition army of the Bambara of Segou and the Peuls of Macina at Tio. The latter were Moslems who had refused to assist him, for that very reason, in his campaign against the Moslem sovereign of Khaaso. There he had condemned as hypocritical for aligning themselves with the pagan Bambara and therefore deserving, like pagans, to be fought on religious grounds.

He seized Segou (March 1861), and then Hamballaya in 1862. The Moslem king of Macina as well as the animist king of Segou were condemned to death. The offensive was carried to Timbuctoo.  But the Peuls of Macina with the help of Cheikh El Bekkai of Timbuctoo, chief of the Kamta Arabs (Kounta Albacaye), put up a stubborn resistance.

Besieged by them in the Hamdallaye, El Haj Omar escaped and tried to get to the Bandiagara region, which was the land of the Dogon, old enemies of the Peuls of Macina. But on his way, he was blocked in the Deguembare grotto, and disappeared under circumstances which have never been clarified. It is not known whether he was smoked and gassed by his opponents or whether he was blown up by his powder (1864). His mysterious disappearance encouraged legends of his survival, and his followers awaited his return on the side of the Mahdi.

El Hadj Omar’s struggle had a liberating, unifying, anti-colonialist and anti-feudal character. From 1855, he said, according to one of his opponents: “The whitemen are only merchants; let them bring me merchandise from their boats, let them pay me a heavy tribute and I shall live in peace with them. But I don’t want them to form establishments on the land, nor send war-ships into the River” (Faidherbe, le Senegal, 1889 p.170).

Another author observed that from Medina to Saint-Louis, Africans spoke about him and trusted in him for he was recorded as the avenger of their race against the Moors and their liberator against the tyranny of the chiefs. (Cultru, Histoie du Senegal du vxe siecle a 1890, 1890, p.335).

But the conflicts between the African society of his time on the one hand, and the forced relationships between this Society and the early hold of colonisers on the other, set the limits to his undertaking. Islam was the cement of the unitary state which he wanted to set up, but the resistance of the animists towards Islamisation demanded from him an effort which sapped the resources which could have been used to fight the colonialists, and his struggle against his compatriot torobes, against the Moslems of Khassa and Macina, set him against a large faction of people who had already been Islamised. El Hadj Omar substituted religious solidarity for that of ethnic groups, and his army accounted for two-fifths of the non-Tuoulor talibe, but the numbers of his compatriots, dominating a region inhabited by other ethnic groups, created the atmosphere of foreign domination.

El Hadj Omar crushed ancient hierarchies but they quickly reformed to the advantage of his talibe and sofa who soon formed a new aristocracy, as influential as the former ones. In relation to the social condition of the Nigerian Sudan, Omar’s unifying role was premature, but from the point of view of this French presence in Senegal, where the social conditions were more favourable and where religious influences were very strong, he arrived too late. The French colonialists could not tolerate the establishment of a powerful state in their sphere of influence and had the military means of opposing him.

El Hadj Omar’s Sudanese Empire lasted up to the time of his son Ahmadou but he too, lacked the ability to overcome the weaknesses which had limited its extension and its consolidation. These difficulties were accentuated by local resistance from various ethnic groups and dissensions between his sons and his lieutenants on one hand and the growing influence of French colonization on the other. El Hadj Omar is nevertheless one of the great precursors – the greatest without doubt in his time – of the resistance and of African national rebirth.

JEAN SURET-CANALE