This section focuses on the pre-colonial settlement of Fulɓe warriors in the Haayre
region. It considers the emergence and trajectories of inclusion and exclusion of the
floating populations in relation to Fulɓe society. The geographic focus is on the Central
Malian region, which is situated east of the capital Bamako and south of Timbouctou (Map 3, Introduction), and specifically on the memories of the inhabitants of Dalla
(Map 4), one of the Fulɓe kingdoms. Like the neighbouring Kingdom of Booni, Dalla
was a node5 of Fulɓe influence in the region. Apart from archival documents, many of
the interpretations of Central Malian history described in this section are based on bard
Aamadu Baa Digi’s oral memories.6 He is a representative of the social group of
craftsmen who are loyal to the royal family of Dalla. His oral recitals of the region’s
history deal mainly with the deeds of the ruling Weheeɓe (see Angenent et al. 2003).
The absence or minimal presence of slaves in oral and written traditions is a recurrent feature of history in Sahelian slave societies. As Klein (1989: 211) puts it: ‘They are mentioned as followers, companions or victims. Traditions are concerned with the deeds of leaders, rulers and founding heroes.’ This is why the second section in this chapter attempts to counter this bias of slaves as historical ‘passives’ and/or ‘outsiders’.
Map 4 The Gandamia plateau of Dalla and its direct surroundings
5 Gallais (1975: 134) uses the term noyau in French, which I translate here as ‘node’.
6 I use the word ‘bard’ to refer to a sub-category of craftsmen (FF: Ŋeeŋɓe). Within this category, bards are praise singers and/or historians attached to the important (royal) families. Amadou Baa Digi was such a historian and attached to Dalla’s royal court (Angenent et al. 2003: 2). His descendants are engaged in jewellery and leather crafting. His son, Hama Amba Yattara, was one of my research assistants during my first fieldwork period in 2001-2002, which was mainly conducted in Dalla and Douentza.
Pre-colonial establishment of Islamic master-slave hierarchies
Baa Digi mentions how raiding Fulɓe warriors occupied the plateaus (FF: Haayre) of
Gourma in Central Mali from the seventeenth century onwards.7 The Haayre region was
a zone of internal chaos and turmoil and the presence of slavery in the area from the
sixteenth century onwards is clear from the vast corpus of Islamic legal documents.8
Rulers and the ruled were continuously interchanging and constantly at risk of being overturned by new political players.
Warnier (1975: 385) uses the concept of ‘floating populations’ in the Cameroonian
context9 to describe the constant power shifts that resulted from raiding, internal
predation and exploitation. His concept aptly describes similar processes in Central Mali where there were floating populations on the margins of the Maasina Empire due to the
presence of roaming warriors.10 An early colonial document11 describes how the people
of Bambara Maounde migrated because of the plundering Tuareg12 warriors near Lake
Kuraaru (Map 3). At the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth century,
Fulɓe warriors were roaming and conquering the Haayre region and generated new
floating populations there. In the context of perpetually alternating alliances between the various warrior groups, the floating populations were both raided and protected by the
Fulɓe. These populations were obliged to pay tribute but their right to protection was
only temporary and insecure. The following French colonial document13 outlines how
the original inhabitants of the plateaus became slaves to the royal courts of local elites: ... the Haɓe, inhabitants of the mountain massifs in Maasina, who, having been taken by the Songhay, were exploited by all the conquerors of Maasina: Fulɓe, Moroccans, Toucouleurs. After ten centuries in this region they became real slaves that patiently succumb to the law of the winner.14
Whole populations were subjected to Fulɓe raids in the name of religious conversion.
The system of enslavement ensured the marginalization of the majority of the popu- lation. For many of these marginalized groups, the only way to ensure protection was to
7 Historical sources mention a Fulɓe presence in Gourma on the right bank of the Niger Delta in Central Mali from the sixteenth century onwards (de Bruijn & van Dijk 2001a: 222). Fourteenth-century chronicles talk about how the region was first inhabited by cultivators and hunter gatherers (Angenent
et al. 1998: 15).
8 The documents written by Ahmed Baaba exemplify this (Lovejoy 2006).
9 Warnier (1975: 385) develops this concept in his PhD thesis in the context of the Cameroonian Grassfields and Argenti (2007: 45) recycles this concept. I use it here as a metaphor for the shifting composition of populations circling around local rulers and elites to whom they deferred.
10 The Maasina Empire (1818-1862) is also called Diina, an Islamic term (de Bruijn & van Dijk 2001a: 217). It is nowadays acknowledged as the most important, centralized Islamic Fulɓe reign in the history of the Malian nation-state (Sanankoua 1990). Its first leader, Sekou Ahmadou, centralized the activities of cohabiting occupational groups of Fulɓe herdsmen, Bozo fishers and Bambara cultivators to the advantage of the Fulɓe herdsmen. With the fertile Niger Delta as its central heartland, the con- trol of dry areas such as the Haayre region near Douentza was important for the empire because they provided cattle grazing when the delta region was flooded. This ecological relationship between the Delta and the Haayre remained important (de Bruijn & van Dijk 1995a).
11 ANM, FA-1E-96. Rapports Politiques, Bandiagara (1904).
12 I use the word Tuareg, although the notion of Kel Tamasheq, which literally means ‘speakers of the Tamasheq language’ is this groups’ self-denomination. Nevertheless, most of the literature about this group in the Malian context uses the term Tuareg (Lecocq 2005, Klute 2005, Giuffrida 2005).
13 Archives Nationales Mali (ANM), Fonds Anciens (FA): 1E-156 (August 1894). 14 Author’s translation from French in ANM, FA: 1E-156 (August 1894).
37
defer to the current ruling raiders. They circled those in power in the hope of gaining favours. Argenti (2007: 45) describes how floating populations in the Cameroonian Grassfields moved on as soon as they had alternative ‘exit options’ (Hirshman 1970) with other patrons elsewhere. The same is likely to have been the case in the Haayre region.
The Fulɓe warlords, known as arduɓe in Maasina, conquered the Haayre region as
nomadic kings with strongholds of power.15 They then established their own lineages
with the ancestral name Dicko and became known as vultures (FF: Weheeɓe) ruling the
local populations they encountered. Coming from Douentza, they settled in Dalla16
under the Islamic leadership of the devout Moodi Mboolaye towards the end of the nineteenth century when they were incorporated into the centralized Muslim Empire of Maasina near the present-day town of Mopti in the western Haayre region (Sanankoua
2001). The islamization of the sedentarizing Fulɓe warriors in the Haayre resulted in a
strong hierarchization of society (de Bruijn & van Dijk 1995a: 57-59). The Weheeɓe
warriors there became allies of the empire’s leader, Seku Amadu (1818-1848) (de Bruijn & van Dijk 1995a: 55), protecting the Maasina Empire from raiding northerners
by sending soldiers when necessary (Angenent et al. 2003: 176). They also kept the
Tuareg and Dogon in the Haayre region in check (Gallais 1967: 156).
The established Fulɓe hierarchy made an explicit distinction between those who were
freeborn and those who were not. Not being freeborn resulted in slave status, according to Islamic conceptions. Slaves became an important social category both demographic-
ally and economically, and Fulɓe society became a slave economy (Finley 1981: 103).
As Meillassoux (1982: 94) stresses: ‘Slavery was in no way a superficial feature of the organization of these societies; history cannot be understood if one ignores it!’ Today the number of villages inhabited by slaves’ descendants testifies to the demographic
preponderance of slave populations in the area.17 Slaves were essential for the economy
of the Fulɓe kingdoms as they carried out heavy physical labour, such as cultivating the
land, which the Fulɓe warriors (FF: Weheeɓe) had appropriated.
Fulɓe rulers in Dalla and Booni were a constant threat to the area’s peasant popu-
lations because of the raids they undertook for loot such as horses, cattle and slaves. Based on a census in Bandiagara District in 1904, Lovejoy (1983: 186-187) describes how 35.6% of the male population, 47.7% of the women and 16.7% of the children were slaves. As a result of these large numbers of slaves, economic surpluses were
generated and contributed to the wealth of Fulɓe rulers who, for a long time, even
expressed their wealth in slaves, although their economic value fluctuated over time. In
the 1920s, a female horse was paid for an adult slave,18 while Bard Baa Digi described
15 Gallais (1975: 134) mentions Noukuri, north of the Gandamia Plateau.
16 According to Baa Digi, their common ancestor, Alu Maane, left three sons, each of whom obtained his own part of a territory spanning from Bandiagara in the south to Lake Niyangay in the north (Map 3). Each son headed his own kingdom: Joona, Kanyume and Haayre. Dalla was the centre of the Haayre region which then also included the territories known today as Gourma and Seeno. Joona and Kanyume are situated in a region now called Guimballa (de Bruijn & van Dijk 1995a: 49-50).
17 For more details on the area, see Chapter 2 and Maps 1-5.
18 El Hajj Bocoum, aged about 70, Dalla. Interview with research assistant Amadu Amiiru Dicko, March 2007.
how ten slaves were equal to the value of a horse in another period (Angenent et al. 2003: 97). Slaves did not necessarily have fixed owners and sometimes were able to bypass this by becoming part of one of the above-mentioned floating populations. The trafficking of slaves took place through raiding and capture but also through marriage
and, as Angenent et al. (2003: 179 Document F) show, in gift exchanges between
owners and rulers.
The model of slavery in the Haayre is a variant of slavery that was widespread across the West African Sahel. Two main categories of slaves are generally distinguished in other Sahelian slavery studies (Lovejoy 1983; Meillassoux 1975; Olivier de Sardan 1976): Slaves living on slave estates, and domestic slaves. The slaves on the estates, who did agricultural work, were often the populations who had inhabited the region
before the Fulɓe conquered it. Domestic slaves were likely to have been enslaved during
raids elsewhere and tended to do domestic work.
Bard Baa Digi described how Moodi Mboolaahi, the first Islamic ruler of Dalla, turned many villages in the Haayre region into slave estates. Ownership over these –
often original – inhabitants of the region was divided among the raiding Weheeɓe, the
religious Moodibaaɓe and the pastoralist Jalluuɓe families. These estate slaves worked
the land and generated surpluses but had to give part (frequently half) of their produce
(millet, cotton) to their master, although the rates were not fixed.19 Upon their conquest
of the region, Fulɓe warriors forced entire – often Dogon – villages to become agri-
cultural slave estates in their kingdoms. Baa Digi (Angenent et al. 2003) indicates how
freeborn Fulɓe presented the slave estates mainly as reservoirs of labour, grain and
animals. The fact that their property could easily be taken away from them is remem- bered today with indignation and frustration by the descendants of estate slaves living on the plateaus today.
In the sedentarized Fulɓe Kingdoms of Dalla and Booni, it were mainly warrior
families who controlled the slave populations on the estates. The pastoralist Fulɓe
owned fewer estate slaves because they needed to rely on other freeborn families in
villages neighbouring their slave estates20 to control their slave populations when they
were not occupying their cattle camps near these estates.21
Domestic slaves were another category, the majority of them had been captured
during raids or wars.22 They could be resold, while those on the slave estates could not.
They lived in the compounds of their master or the king and sometimes the children of the slaves on the estates were taken as domestic slaves or as concubines for their
masters. Domestic slaves23 had tasks that included food preparation, fetching water and
19 Chapter 4 gives more details of slave labour. On the issue of (land) taxes by ruling elites, see Chapter 5 on legal pluralism.
20 Examples on the territory of Dalla are the villages of Torbani and Nani (Map 5). 21 Due to the pastoralist mobility of these Ful
ɓe, their estate slaves had to be controlled by others. Such was the case for slaves inhabiting the sub-ward of Wuro Birigiri (Map 6 and Chapter 2). However, the domestic slaves of pastoralist Fulɓe were incorporated into the families of their masters and joined them on transhumance.
22 Domestic slaves often remember their former family ties less well than the Riimaay
ɓe on the slave estates (Meillassoux 1991).
39
cleaning. Male slaves took care of the horses, fought as soldiers or prepared building materials such as wood, mud bricks and reeds. Some domestic slaves voluntarily de- ferred to powerful and wealthy elites to obtain economic support and ensured protection against enslavement by other rulers (Iliffe 1987).
Although both groups shared the same slave status, their individual conditions differed (Meillassoux 1991). Some became trusted persons and historical sources attest to the fact that some masters allowed their slaves to trade (Hall 2009; Baier 1980). In
Dalla, slave descendant Allay Jangine24 was given as a tax payment from a trader (FF:
Jawaanɗo) to the royal Weheeɓe family of Dalla. Allay proudly remembers how he had the honour of guarding the royal granaries and prisons, a position of trust. In the last ten
years of his life, he became the head of the slaves (FF: Amiiru Maccuɓe) at the royal
court of Dalla.25
Not only the roles and individual conditions of slaves but also their possibilities for emancipation varied considerably. Since the floating populations continuously changed positions and alliances, those enslaved sometimes managed to become rulers. Islam too
encouraged the redemption and manumission26 of slaves (Lofkrantz 2008; Lovejoy
2009; Dadi Addoun 2005) and for others marriage with partners in other ethnic groups
created options to emancipate.27
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Maasina Empire of Seku Amadu was
overruled by Fulɓe from the west (FF: Fuutankooɓe) led by El Hajj Oumar. Weheeɓe
warriors were being raided themselves and to maintain their status and income, they oppressed their slaves. This is allegedly why a group of exhausted but powerful warrior slaves decided to leave their masters in Dalla and follow a new leader called Maamadu Nduuldi who founded the Kingdom of Booni some 40 km to the east of Dalla. Until the arrival of the French at the beginning of the twentieth century, Dalla, Booni and the Songhay Kingdom of Hombori dominated the political scenery of the present-day Haayre region.
Questioning French colonial abolition of slavery
This sub-section considers how the French colonial abolition of slavery affected master-
slave relations in Fulɓe society and how this policy remained superficial and formal.
With regard to slave trade and markets, French colonial policy was successful but not when it came to domestic slavery and socio-cultural perceptions of slavery. As a result of reliance on indirect rule, French policies often strengthened Sahelian slave societies. Occasionally, and especially towards the end of colonial occupation, the French ad-
ministration drastically inverted existing hierarchies.28
24 Allay Jangine, born around 1935, interviews with research assistant Umu Sangare, Dalla, November 2001-May 2002.
25 See Chapter 4 for more about Allay’s life history and his position as the chief of slaves. 26 For more on (Islamic) manumission procedures in the region, see Chapter 5.
27 Chapter 6 describes how various forms of mobility offered ways for the emancipation of slaves in the pre-colonial period.
28 Various examples are mentioned by Berndt (2008) for Guimballa; by Lecocq (2005) for Northern Mali and Klein (1998) for Maasina and the West African region more generally.
The first French base on present-day Malian territory (then called the French Sudan) was established in Bamako in 1883 (Roberts quoted in Lovejoy 1983: 175). Anti- slavery measures were part of the motivation for and legitimization of the colonial regime’s civilizing mission. The first official treaty between the colonial powers was the Treaty of Brussels in 1889, which resulted in rendering slave markets and the trade in slaves illegal in oversees colonies. However, slavery as an institution was only abol- ished by French colonial legislation in 1905 (Klein 1998; Kopytoff & Miers 1977; Klein & Miers 1999a: 4; Botte 1999a: 15). There was much regional variation in the effect- iveness of French abolitionist policies. Since the Haayre region, which is central to this study, was part of a vast territory governed by only one French commander, French colonial policies had a marginal effect.
When French commanders arrived in Bandiagara, they reported on the many raiding groups in the area, sketching a situation of turmoil, unrest and repression, and a flourishing slave trade.
The trade of non-free persons is effectively very active in the region. Sarafere is a market where people from the North come to buy. Since the beginning of the month, I counted 43 non-free (people) being bought by various individuals in this market in order to take them to Timbouctou () and Goundam. Women and children are the ones feeding the market mostly. Where do they come from? Some say they are Mossi, others say they are from Maasina and still others say they come from the South.29
Colonial documents also mention the trading of eunuchs to Turkey30 and regional
slave markets in the towns of Bandiagara (Lovejoy 1983), Hombori and Dori.31 Slaves
were transported south via Douentza and Hombori32 to Dori and on to the British Gold
Coast colonies until the French blocked this trading route in 1885.33
Elderly slave descendants recount memories of how their fathers and mothers were
captured. Allay Jangine,34 an elderly slave descendant, was visibly emotional when
describing how his grandparents ‘were sold at the market with ropes around their necks, like animals’. Slaves were either captured collectively during raids or kidnapped as individuals in adjacent areas, such as Mossi from Burkina Faso, Hausa from Tera in Niger.
French abolitionist measures that rendered slavery illegal resulted in the return of
captured slaves from many areas to their regions of origin.35 Others – often first-gene-
ration slaves – left their masters and founded their own villages (FF: Debere) (Griep
2005; Riesman 1977: 120). From 1897 onwards, the French encouraged this emanci- patory movement of slaves they wanted to free. To do so, French policy officially
29 Author’s translation of an excerpt from ANM, FA: 2E-04; cercle Bandiagara, 1899-1907. Politique
Indigène.
30 ANM, FA: 2E-04; cercle Bandiagara, 1899-1907.
31 Today Dori is in northern Burkina Faso near the border with Mali and the Central Malian Seeno (Map