Eugene Mage‘s view of the lifting of the siege of Fort du Médine, from Voyage dans le Soudan occidental (1868).
Meanwhile, the jihad army had fared less well against its French opponents. Although the Tukolors won the odd skirmish against Faidherbe’s troops, most of the battles ended in French victories. “By all accounts al-Hajj Umar’s troops fought valiantly” against the French, a recent scholar has written,
But in the pitched battles their formations quickly broke up into formless frontal assaults, carried out with great impetus, but helter-skelter, and, more often than not, across open ground. They offered rewarding targets to the French-officered African regulars, in their tight squares and with their measured fire control. The drenching volleys usually saturated the attack before the jihadists with their inadequate weapons could get within killing range.
Firepower and fire control, however, were not the ultimate reasons for the French triumph over the Tukolors. What really determined the outcome of the Franco-Tukolor wars was the greater mobility of the French, the factor which had won Algeria for Bugeaud and the Armée d’Afrique. This was dramatically illustrated in the famous siege of the French fortress of Médine related below.
The object of Franco-Tukolor conflict during the Médine campaign was access to the strategic Futa Toro region, Umar’s native turf and the source of much of his support. Although the khalifa was prepared to concede physical control of the region to the French, it remained crucial to him as a source of soldiers for his jihad, and he continued to visit it on recruiting drives. The French, in turn, saw Umar’s jihadist agitation in the area as a threat to order and security in the whole western Senegal region, and naturally took steps to restrict his access. In 1855 Faidherbe personally oversaw the construction of a fort at Médine, on a bluff above the farthest navigable point of the Senegal River and astride Umar’s easiest line of communication with Futa Toro. The fortress also served as a rallying point for the Khassonké, the people of the surrounding kingdom of Khasso, part of whom were in revolt against the Tukolors, their nominal overlords. In 1857, urged on by his talaba and apparently against his better judgment, Umar ordered an assault on Médine. The ensuing siege has enjoyed a reputation as one of the epic battles in French colonial and Tukolor history.
From mid-April to mid-July 1857 some 15,000 Tukolors besieged the fort and its outlying walled village. Although the defenders numbered some 10,000, only about 1,000 of them were able-bodied men, of whom just 64 – including six French marine infantrymen and 40 African soldiers and sailors – had any military training. The rest were Khassonké women, children and old men. Nevertheless, strong in its bluff-top location and the cannon posted at each of its four corners, the fort withstood several massed assaults. The Tukolors, who, strangely, never brought their siege artillery into play, were unable to get close enough to the fort to place scaling ladders against the walls. By early July, however, the defenders were running low on food and ammunition. Fearing the worst, the fort’s commander, a mulatto merchant and militia captain from St. Louis named Paul Holle, had a huge banner hung over the fortress gate inscribed with the words, “Long live Jesus! Long live the Emperor! Conquer or die for God and our Emperor!”
But help was on the way, in the person of no less a figure than Louis Faidherbe, the governor himself. With 500 men crammed into two armed steamboats, he left St. Louis on 5 July and ten days later was approaching Médine, when his flotilla touched bottom in the river. The resourceful Faidherbe disembarked his troops in order to refloat the steamboats, then marched overland in time to join the boats in attacking the Tukolor host outside Médine. A cannonade from the steamboats and a bayonet charge by Faidherbe’s men scattered the enemy. And not a moment too soon. When rescue came, Paul Holle and his defending force were down to their last artillery round and were contemplating blowing themselves up in the powder magazine.
The relief of Médine makes clear that the story of the French conquest of Senegal and ultimately of the Western Sudan is in large part the story of the effective use of naval power. This has not been sufficiently recognized. Nor has sufficient credit been given to the sailors, French but especially African, who manned the vessels on the Senegal and Niger rivers and, in so doing, made a contribution to the French military effort in West Africa as important as that of the much-touted African light infantry, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais. It was the armed steamers of the French navy’s river fleet that brought Faidherbe’s troops inland for lightning raids on enemy villages. And as was seen in the siege of Médine, without the river fleet and its ability to bring forward troops and supplies, the whole French strategy of projecting power into the interior through the onward march of forts would have been impossible.
