El Hadj Umar Tall, also Umar Tal,Umar Taal “Umar Futi”, al-Hajj Umar ibn Sa’id Tal, or el-Hadj Omar ibn Sa’id Tal, (ca. 1797 – 1864) was a Senegalese politician, Islamic scholar, and Toucouleur king who founded a brief empire encompassing much of what is now Guinea, Senegal, and Mali. Early in his career he preached and wrote against social injustices such as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Umar’s jihad army had as its elite corps his close disciples, the talaba, who, in the great tradition of warfare in the Western and Central Sudan, served as mounted shock troops. These cavalrymen were frequently full members of the Tijani brotherhood and, as students of Umar, could boast some education, even if it was of a doctrinaire religious kind. The Tukolor infantry, meanwhile, was composed of volunteers from Futa Toro and converted animists, known as sofas, and conscripted levies, called tuburru. Many of the latter had been forced to serve, and were liable to desert at the first opportunity. The sofas, in addition to bearing arms, functioned as servants to the talaba, setting up camp, cooking, and caring for the horses. Their loyalty was reinforced by the right to plunder the enemy alongside their talaba masters. The tuburru, on the other hand, were forbidden to take booty. Most of Umar’s soldiers were Tukolors from the Futa Toro, but there were also contingents drawn from other peoples in Senegal and from Guinea to the south, from Bornu and Sokoto in the Central Sudan and even from among the Arabs and Berbers of Mauritania.

The Tukolor army was reasonably well equipped with modern weapons. Generous monetary donations by the faithful, together with the early capture of the gold mines of the Bambuk region, made possible large purchases of muskets, powder and ball and some rifles and ammunition from English and French traders. The army also possessed four artillery pieces taken from the French. These were used to great effect in the capture of Segu and other cities in the Bambara kingdoms to the east. And, again like Abd el-Kader in Algeria, the khalifa employed his own gunsmiths to manufacture and repair weapons. Just how much of a help this was to his army remains open to conjecture. Says one writer:

No doubt this corps [of gunsmiths] could service flintlock muskets and supply locally made ball and powder. One wonders, however, how well they were able to cope with the miscellany of European rifles which the army also possessed. It is difficult to believe that al-Hajj Umar’s gunsmiths, without access to the proper workshop facilities required to repair precision weapons and to manufacture cartridge ammunition, can really have kept such weapons in service for any length of time.

During the era of al-Hajj Umar, in the 1850s and 1860s, the Tukolor army enjoyed a reputation as a formidable fighting force. No doubt some of this was due to the ability of the khalifa’s sofas and cavalry to manoeuvre in formation – the Tukolor army was one of very few West African indigenous fighting forces with this capacity as early as this in the century – but the real source of the army’s strength lay in the zeal of its soldiers. For the more devout in the ranks, war under Umar was an opportunity to spread the faith by crushing pagans and infidels. Others served loyally because they identified with the army’s Tijani leadership.

Common soldiers, for example, would have appreciated the more egalitarian outlook of the Tijaniyya order. Unlike other Sufi brotherhoods, such as the rival Qadiriyya, the Tijaniyya accepted all the faithful into membership, even women and slaves. Other soldiers might have welcomed the brotherhood’s anti-authoritarian tendencies. One of Umar’s favorite Sufi aphorisms concerned the inherent wickedness of kings. “The best of princes are those who repair to the learned,” he wrote early in his career, “but the worst of the learned are those who frequent princes . . . Men of learning are trusted by God’s Prophets so long as they do not mix with sultans; if they do so, they have betrayed them.”

Like Abd el-Kader in Algeria a decade earlier, al-Hajj Umar was a powerful charismatic figure, and it may well have been the fanatical devotion of his soldiers to his person that made the Tukolor army of his day such a potent fighting force. He had returned from his pilgrimage endowed by the master Sufis of his order with baraka, the blessing of God, and the gift of istikhara, “a formula of prayers [going back to the Prophet] which would always indicate to him the right line of action and lead him out of all difficulties”. His troops knew of these powers and believed that they would be invoked if necessary to save them from defeat in battle. Umar promised his followers that their deaths on the battlefield would ensure their entry into heaven. His description of paradise was a compelling one.

Its palaces are high, its light radiant, its rivers flowing, its bunches of fruit close at hand, its towers unbroken . . . Its buildings are of silver and gold. There is no clamor there, no illness. Even the pebbles are pearls and jewels. The rivers are of milk and honey . . . The palaces are of hollow pearl, towering seventy miles into the air, of green chrysolith of dazzling brilliance, of red ruby rising high.

No wonder Faidherbe could write of Umar’s warriors: “They charge our lines as if they are seeking martyrdom; it is clear they want to die.”

Nevertheless, despite the religious fervour which inspired it, there was considerable potential for disorder and indiscipline within the Tukolor army which only the charisma and prestige of its commander, al-Hajj Umar, seemed capable of holding in check. The tuburru as well as some sofas resented the preference shown to the talaba in matters of booty and positions of influence. The issue of booty was of critical importance, since loot was the only payment for service most of the soldiers ever received. In addition, “[m]any of the sofas were men of great personal courage and while some were brought into [Umar’s] counsel, others never received the distinction for which they had angled so hard”.

The army’s grumbling may simply have reflected social tensions within the evolving Tukolor state. As the later example of the Mahdist state in the Sudan will bear out, it is difficult to sustain the fervour and commitment of religious crusades for very long, especially when they triumph. Once the struggle ends, the movement finds itself confronted with the often more difficult challenges of governing. Koranic wisdom does not always provide adequate answers to these. Like Sudanese Mahdism once again, the Tukolor empire toward the end of Umar’s lifetime, but especially during that of his son and successor, Ahmadu Seku, evolved into a traditional hierarchical state. The old ruling class in the conquered lands gave way to a new one composed largely of al-Hajj Umar’s faithful talaba. Indeed, B.O. Oloruntimehin sees the whole Tukolor empirebuilding process as a gigantic exercise in social mobility, with the new clerical elite, the talaba, generally emerging as the winners.

This crisis of the maturing jihad state was complicated by the fact that the majority population, the defeated Bambara, by and large never reconciled themselves to their new masters or their religion. But even among Muslim subjects there was frequent tension. Many of these were followers of the Qadiriyya brotherhood, and resented the scorn directed their way by their new Tijani overlords. These divisions, which only grew sharper with time, naturally played into the hands of the French. Their ability to find allies among disgruntled subjects of the Tukolors was eventually instrumental in giving the French military control of the Senegalese interior and the Western Sudan.

Whatever tensions may have seethed in its ranks, the Tukolor army held together well enough to overrun the Bambara states of Kaarta and Segu between 1854 and 1858 and to go on to conquer the neighbouring Muslim kingdom of Masina. By 1864, Umar’s army stood on the banks of the Niger far to the north-east, engaged in battle for control of the great city of Timbuktu. Until Samori’s empire was forged later in the century, the Tukolor empire was the largest and most powerful state in the Western Sudan. At its greatest, it spread along the river Senegal and included the Niger river basin north-eastwards to Timbuktu. It covered the present area of the Republic of Mali (excepting the largely desert areas north of Timbuktu), the Moorish emirates which now form the southern part of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, the Dinguiray province in the northern part of the Republic of Guinea and parts of modern Senegal.