Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions. Paul E. Lovejoy
primary languages of the religious and political elite, but Hausa and Mandinke were dominant over wide regions and were closely associated with trade. Hence these languages and their corresponding labeling in the Americas as Hausa or Mandinga/Mandingo reflected African backgrounds that need to be tied more closely to our understanding of Atlantic history. The role of Fulbe clerics was particularly important in spreading jihād ideology (plate 2). These distinctions were important in Bahia and helped shape resistance. In other words, if the Bahia uprising is to be considered within an Atlantic perspective during the age of revolutions, it has to be seen in the context of events in West Africa. To a great extent the transatlantic dimension is missing this perspective, particularly with reference to the jihād states of those portions of the interior known as the western and central Bilād al-Sūdān. By the eighteenth century “Bilād al-Sūdān,” the Arabic term for “land of the blacks,” had come to designate the savanna and Sahel regions bordering the southern Sahara and specifically identified the Islamic states that dominated this region. Indeed, in some sources from the nineteenth century, the term “Soudan” is the name used for the Sokoto Caliphate, as distinct from Borno, for example.
The presence of enslaved Muslims in the Americas is well established, although the connection or lack thereof with the jihād movement depended on a number of factors that reveal the intersection between the jihād movement and the age of revolutions and the major transformations in slave resistance in the Americas. The experiences of Muslims in Bahia, where Yoruba became the common language of the Muslim community, even though that community also included other Muslims who were not Yoruba in origin, helps us understand the age of jihād. As I examine in this book, there are many accounts of individuals whose lives relate to the jihād movement, including Richard Pierpoint, who was enslaved in Fuuta Bundu and fought on the side of the British in the American War of Independence and then with Canadian troops who repulsed the American invasion of the Niagara Peninsula in the War of 1812. Similarly, Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu, enslaved in 1777 near Fuuta Jalon, subsequently led a Muslim community in Jamaica until his death in 1845, while Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua was enslaved near Djougou in the year of Kabā’s death and, after being in Brazil for two years (1845–47), was able to escape in New York; Baquaqua subsequently wanted to head a Baptist mission to Africa, but this never happened. Finally, Muhammed ʿAlī Saʿīd, who was enslaved in Borno in 1851, when Baquaqua was at Central College in upstate New York, traveled through the Ottoman Empire and then to Europe, the Caribbean, and North America before joining the Union army in 1863, although he had never been enslaved in the United States. All were Muslims, and their stories help connect the worlds of revolution and jihād.
The problem is one of perspective. A consideration of slave resistance and revolution in the Atlantic world has tended to focus on the Americas and Europe without attempting to understand what was happening in Africa. The “age of revolutions” as a concept and a chronological period of history owes a great debt to Hobsbawm, Genovese, and other scholars. The chronicle of historical change from the last decades of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century has been isolated as a phase in the history of slavery and specifically its demise that was associated with revolutionary change in western Europe. As we are all aware, the abolition movement in Britain, the French Revolution, the uprising in St. Domingue, the independence of Haiti, and slave resistance from the United States to Brazil figure prominently in our understanding of this period of history and its interface with the emerging Industrial Revolution and the constitutional restrictions or outright elimination of monarchal rule in western Europe. Consequently, this book is a dialogue with Hobsbawm and Genovese, and by extension with the dominant literature on slavery and resistance in the Americas, Atlantic studies, and comparative history.
My dialogue with these scholars and the trend in historiography that derives from their inspiration, especially the emergence of Atlantic studies and the “black Atlantic” paradigm, concentrates on the events in Africa that occurred during the period of the age of revolutions and how these events in Africa might or might not have helped shape the patterns of change in the Americas that led to the destruction of slavery as the dominant institution there. How are we to conceptualize African history and the origins of people from Africa who were involved in the revolutionary events of the Americas? I contend that influences emanating from Africa and specifically the jihād movement in West Africa had a profound impact on the shaping of revolutionary forces in the Americas. The jihād movement clearly helped shape events in Bahia, specifically the Malês uprising of 1835, and also the consolidation of Yoruba influence in Cuba. Implicitly, I am raising questions about the scope of the age of revolutions and revolutionary action among enslaved populations in the Americas, and I am challenging Atlantic studies to broaden the conception of the Atlantic world to include events in Atlantic Africa and its interior. Hobsbawm’s interest in the transformation of government in the age of revolutions, with the challenge to despotic monarchy and the emergence of more democratic regimes, might lead us to a consideration of how the jihād movement transformed government in West Africa at the same time. In parallel with the changing nature of slave resistance in the Americas and the emergence of a “second slavery” in the Americas in the nineteenth century, moreover, the jihād movement resulted in a great increase in the number of slaves in West Africa that can be placed alongside the increase in slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States.
Specifically, João José Reis has demonstrated the complex nature of the Muslim uprising in Bahia in 1835 in terms of the identification of participants along class lines (slave/free), on the basis of ethnicity (Yoruba, i.e., Nagô, Hausa, and so on), and according to religious divisions (Islam, oriṣa worship, and so on). Stuart Schwartz earlier drew attention to the various Hausa revolts and conspiracies in Bahia from 1807 onward.38 Admittedly, Michael Gomez has recognized the importance of Islamic influence in the Americas. Moreover, Sylviane Diouf has examined resistance and revolution in the context of African influences on events in the Americas, but Gomez and Diouf do not base their works on the Sokoto Caliphate and its role in West Africa, which is the focus here.39 It is my contention that these contributions fall short of placing the events of the Americas during the age of revolutions in the context of the jihād movement and specifically events that created the Sokoto Caliphate. In fact, Diouf contends that the conditions for jihād were not present in Bahia in the 1830s, an interpretation that Reis has accepted.40 Similarly, Manuel Barcia has drawn attention to the presence of Muslims in Cuba as a result of the traffic from the Bight of Benin to Cuba and has correctly recognized the role of jihād in their enslavement and the enslavement of many non-Muslims as a result of the jihād. Barcia has identified fifteen revolts and conspiracies in Cuba between 1832 and 1844 that were associated with Yoruba who had been enslaved in the context of the jihād, although most of the participants, if not all, were not Muslims.41
The fact that Muslim slaves were common along the routes stretching through Yorubaland to Bahia by the early nineteenth century has prompted Humphrey Fisher to argue that the jihād erupted “precisely because Muslim slaves were arriving in Yorubaland and Bahia, torn from Hausaland and dar al-Islam. . . . The shock waves, flowing into Hausaland, helped ignite the jihād; then, flowing out again, spread that example.”42 Fisher’s conclusion is supported by the writings of Muhammad Bello and the analysis that the enslavement of Muslims was a major factor that prompted the outbreak of jihād in 1804. Although the role of Hausa and other Muslims in the uprising of 1835 is subject to different interpretations, my understanding of the Malês uprising places a heavy emphasis on the role of Islam as a unifying force. The uprising and, even more threatening, the possible appeal to the population outside Salvador rested on its appeal to Islam, in which Yoruba was used as the common language of communication because most Muslims were Yoruba or at least spoke the language. However, the historic importance of the Hausa cities and their mosques, such as the Gobarau Mosque in Katsina, has to be emphasized (plate 3). Individuals originally from Borno or one of the Hausa centers most certainly would have spoken Yoruba as well and in some contexts would have been identified as such. The odyssey of ʿAlī Eisami demonstrates this complexity. ʿAlī was from Borno, had been sold as a slave because he was captured in the jihād, and had been taken south through the Hausa towns, ending up in the capital of Oyo. On the outbreak of the Ilorin uprising in 1817, ʿAlī was sold south because it was feared that he would flee to the cause of Islam. Instead, ʿAlī became a Christian in Sierra