Senegal

An African Nation Between Islam And The West, Second Edition

Sheldon Gellar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000311242
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

A West African nation with an extremely rich political and cultural heritage, Senegal continues to serve as a role model for Francophone Africa despite its weak economic base and small population. Senegal's status as both a Sahelian and a maritime country brought its people into early contact with Islam and the West, making the country a crossroads where traditional African, Islamic, and European cultures met and blended. Sheldon Gellar begins his exploration of Senegal by examining the influence of Islam, Western imperialism, and French colonial rule and by tracing the country's political, economic, and social evolution since independence. This expanded second edition also analyses developments since 1983, looking in particular at the state of multiparty democracy, the 1993 national elections, the deterioration of the political climate following the assassination of the vice president of the Constitutional Council, the 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc, and the return of Abdoulaye Wade to the government coalition in 1995. Despite its inability to break out of severe and chronic economic crises, Senegal has managed to solicit high levels of foreign aid and has gained a significant profile on the international scene. Gellar closes with an evaluation of the social and cultural trends that have contributed to Senegal's emergence as one of Africa's most important cultural centers.

1
THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

MODERN SENEGAL’S NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT has been profoundly affected by its strategic location and dual vocation as both a Sahelian and an Atlantic country. Sahelian Senegal’s long involvement in trans-Saharan trade exposed it to Islamic currents from North Africa. Thus, more than a millennium ago the peo-pies inhabiting the banks of the Senegal River were among the first in West Africa to embrace Islam. And because of its proximity to Western Europe and the New World, Atlantic Senegal became one of the first areas to develop direct commercial ties with Europe, more than five centuries ago, and to send large numbers of slaves to the Americas. Senegal’s geography has brought its people into close contact with North Africa and the West and has made Senegal a crossroads where Black African, Islamic, and European civilizations have met, clashed, and blended. Today, Senegal plays an active role on the world scene as a bridge between Africa and the West and an Islamic nation with strong ties to the Muslim world—two roles that Senegalese have been playing for many centuries. Although Islamic and Western influences have done much to shape modern Senegal, the Senegalese people remain deeply attached to traditional Black African values and world views.

Precolonial Senegal

Little is known about the origins of the peoples who now inhabit modern Senegal—the Wolof, Serer, Lebu, Tukulor, Fulbe, Sarakollé, Mandinka, and Diola—or how and when they first arrived in the region. The late Senegalese historian and cultural nationalist Cheikh Anta Diop has argued that most of Senegal’s peoples originated in the Nile River Valley and then emigrated to West Africa.¹ Diop based his theory on similarities between the language and culture of ancient Egypt and those found in Senegal and other parts of West Africa.

Figure 1.1

While Europe was passing through the Middle Ages, precolonial Senegal had already been organized into chiefdoms and larger political units patterned on the Sudanic state model, which flourished in West Africa during the ascendancy of the mighty Ghana and Mali empires. In the Sudanic state system, a dominant ruling lineage usually established its hegemony over other peoples through conquest.² Power derived from control over people rather than territory. Because land was plentiful then, the ruler was more concerned with exacting tribute from as many villages and social groups as possible than with exercising direct political sovereignty over a given territory. At the local level, villages, towns, and social groups that were incorporated into the dominant political unit enjoyed a considerable measure of autonomy as long as they acknowledged the authority of the ruling lineage, paid their taxes, provided men for public works and military service, and extended hospitality to visiting officials. However, revolts were frequent, and territorial boundaries expanded and contracted with the rise and decline of the military prowess of the ruling lineage. The capitals of Sudanic states usually were not fixed but were located wherever the ruler decided to establish his court.

Tekrur, a densely populated kingdom situated in the Middle Senegal River Valley and founded more than a thousand years ago, was one of the oldest and most prominent of Senegal’s precolonial African states.³ Thanks to its strategic location reaching to the edge of the desert, Tekrur prospered from the trans-Saharan trade between North and West Africa, which involved gold and slaves moving north and cowries, salt, and weapons coming south. During the eleventh century, Tekrur’s Tukulor ruler, War Jabi, came under the influence of Muslim traders and missionaries from North Africa and converted to Islam. The great majority of the Tukulor people soon followed War Jabi’s example, and the Tukulor became the first major Senegalese ethnic group to embrace Islam en masse. From Tekrur arose the Almoravid movement, which swept through Morocco and Spain during the last third of the eleventh century. Over the years, Tekrur became a training ground for Muslim clerics and missionaries operating throughout modern Senegal and West Africa.

During the thirteenth century, Tekrur became a vassal state of the powerful Mandinka Mali Empire to the east. At the same time, the Wolof were being unified under the leadership of the legendary Ndiadiane N’Diaye. After the Wolof of Djolof chose N’Diaye as their ruler (bourba), he conquered the Wolof states of Walo, Cayor, and Baol and united them to form the Djolof Empire toward the end of the thirteenth century. Eventually the Djolof Empire extended its dominion to include the predominantly Serer kingdoms of Sine and Saloum.

Although exposed to Islamic influences through Muslim clerics, traders, and court advisers, the Djolof Empire, unlike Tekrur, resisted Islamization and most of its leaders and people remained firmly attached to their traditional religious practices. The Djolof Empire reached its peak during the fifteenth century, when it controlled much of modern Senegal’s heartland north of the Gambia River. The empire disintegrated during the second half of the sixteenth century when Baol, Cayor, Walo, Sine, and Saloum broke away to establish their own independent kingdoms. Although the original core state of Djolof survived, it never recaptured its former glory.

Senegal’s state structures and social patterns were comparatively stable by the end of the sixteenth century. Most of Senegal’s peoples lived in highly stratified societies based primarily on blood relationships. Precolonial Senegalese society was divided into three main social categories: freemen, servile artisan castes, and slaves. Some scholars estimate that as much as one-half to two-thirds of the population were slaves.⁴ Less than 10 percent were artisans.

The main characteristic shared by freemen, including royalty and the poorest commoner, was their agricultural vocation and strong attachment to the land. Members of the royal lineages were at the top of the social hierarchy of freemen. Only men with royal blood could aspire to the succession. Bloodlines tended to be traced from the mother’s side. The nobility consisted of those families related to the royal lineage by birth, marriage, and tradition; to local chiefs; and to prominent military commanders. The commoners were freemen who had no royal or noble blood, and most were peasants.

Sharp differences in social status differentiated the freemen and the servile castes. Artisans constituted the majority of precolonial Senegal’s casted population and supplied most of the goods and services required by a preindustrial agrarian society. The most prominent caste occupations in descending order of status were jewelers, blacksmiths, weavers, leather-workers, and griots, who were the musicians, praise-singers, and guardians of oral tradition. Occupations were inherited, and intermarriage rarely took place outside of the caste. Casted women shared the status of their spouses and often practiced similar occupations. Despite their inferior social status, casted Africans frequently enjoyed higher living standards than the average free peasant eking out a hard existence from the soil.

Slaves occupied the bottom rung of society. There were considerable differ-enees in status and treatment among the various categories of slaves. Domestic slaves (i.e., those born into slavery in the household of the master) generally could not be sold. Unlike chattel slaves in the New World, domestic slaves in Senegal, although obliged to work for their masters, were usually given some land of their own to farm and were permitted to marry and raise families. Trade slaves, however, usually captured in war and sold before they could form any permanent ties with the local community, had no rights. Crown slaves constituted a third category. The less fortunate ones performed the most grueling and dangerous forms of manual labor; others served in the ruler’s household or were recruited into the ruler’s army.

The warrior crown slaves (ceddo) were a special class. Despite their lowly slave status, many ceddo who displayed exceptional military prowess held high-ranking positions. A warrior slave could become a general, lead the ruler’s armies, acquire great wealth, and own other slaves. As a group, the ceddo, like the Roman Praetorian Guard, often played a decisive role in determining who would rule by supporting or opposing rival claimants for the crown.

The power and prestige of rulers depended largely upon the number of warriors and clients they could maintain in their personal entourages. Rulers were expected to be generous and even extravagant in rewarding their followers. In return, they could count upon their entourages’ loyalty and devotion. A ruler’s entourage cut across class, caste, and kinship lines and included members drawn from all segments of society. Rulers needed warriors to fight their battles, griots to sing their praises and mock their enemies, courtiers to provide good counsel and service, skilled artisans to fabricate weapons and luxuries, and slaves to work their fields and mines and serve in their households.

Precolonial Senegal was by no means homogeneous in social organization. Caste lines and slavery, for example, were less developed among the Serer and the Diola than among the Tukulor, Wolof, and Mandinka. The Diola and other ethnic groups in the Casamance region usually had less complex and relatively more egalitarian political units than those found in the north. The status of women also was usually higher in the Casamance, where men and women shared agricultural duties.

The peoples of Senegal began to trade with Europe with the arrival of the Portuguese in the mid-fifteenth century. Until the end of the sixteenth century, the Senegambian region was the largest supplier of slaves to Europe.⁵ During the seventeenth century, Europeans began to turn their attention to the more densely populated areas of West and Central Africa in their quest for slaves to work the sugar plantations of the New World. However, Senegambia remained an important source of slaves, exporting an average of 2,000 to 3,500 slaves a year until the end of the eighteenth century.

The rise of the Atlantic slave trade and the heightened competition for slaves to export spurred warfare within the Senegambian region, disrupted food production, and often brought misery and famine to the masses. The constant warfare was accompanied by a marked increase in the size and power of the warrior class and a widening gulf between nobles and warriors, on the one hand, and the peasants, who were the main victims of slave raids and ceddo plundering of the countryside, on the other. The intensification of the slave trade in the Senegal River region during the latter half of the seventeenth century gave rise to a popular but unsuccessful movement (1671–3677) led by Muslim clerics, or marabouts, in revolt against the tyranny of the slave-trading traditional aristocracy. The aristocracy, however, crushed the revolt with the help of firearms supplied by the French from Saint Louis.⁶

The French had originally come to Senegal to reap the benefits of the Atlantic slave trade and to assert France’s position as a major European naval power. They gained a solid foothold in Senegal after establishing a fort and trading post at Saint Louis in 1659 and driving the Dutch from the isle of Gorée in 1677.

European Imperialism and Islam

British and French rivalry for empire and control over West African trade during the eighteenth century often pitted these two powers against each other in the Senegambian region. France controlled Saint Louis and Gorée; the British had established themselves further south near the mouth of the Gambia River. Neither power was strong enough to drive the other out of the region or to penetrate the interior, which remained under African rule. Their presence, however, laid the groundwork for the eventual partition of the Senegambian region into the British colony of Gambia and the French colony of Senegal in the late nineteenth century.

The growing imperialist rivalry between France and Britain also coincided with a militant Islamic revival in Senegal.⁷ In 1776 a group of Tukulor marabouts led a successful revolution that overthrew the Denianké dynasty, rulers of Futa Toro since the sixteenth century. After establishing a theocratic oligarchy, the leaders of the clerical party began to send missionaries throughout Senegal and to develop close ties with other resurgent Islamic movements in Guinea and elsewhere in West Africa.

During the mid-nineteenth century, Tukulor clerics from Futa Toro led many of the jihads, or holy wars, that sought to overthrow pagan rulers and create Muslim theocratic states in the region. The most eminent of the Muslim clerical warriors was Al Haj Umar Tall. While on pilgrimage to Mecca in the 1820s, Tall was initiated into the Tijaniyya brotherhood, an organization that had been founded in Fez (Morocco) by Ahmad al־Tijani in the late eighteenth century. As the appointed Tijani Khalife (caliph) for the western Sudan, Tall acquired a large following after visiting the major West African Muslim courts at Kanem, Sokoto, Macina, and Futa Djallon. In 1852 he organized an army and made preparations for a jihad to build a Tijani Islamic empire. After conquering vast stretches of pagan and Muslim territory from Medina to the Niger Bend, Tall moved to extend his power to Senegal. There he came into conflict with the French, who were themselves embarking on a campaign to extend their power.

France’s program for expansion began shortly after Major Louis Faidherbe was named governor of French Senegal in 1854. Faidherbe first launched a successful military campaign to subjugate the Moors of Trarza, who controlled the lucrative gum trade on both sides of the Senegal River, and then in 1855 he annexed Walo, which became the first indigenous African state to come directly under French rule. Next Faidherbe built forts at Matam, Bakel, and other points along the Senegal River to ensure French control and to stop Tail’s westward advance. By the end of 1859, several of Tail’s efforts to dislodge the French had failed, and the Tukulor leader once again turned to the east, where he consolidated his hold over a vast empire before dying in battle in 1864. Tail’s Islamic reform movement was the first to come into open conflict with European imperialist ambitions in West Africa, and Tall himself became a rallying point for African resistance to the French.

Other Islamic reformers followed Tail’s example and clashed with the French as well as with pagan states and peoples resisting conversion to Islam. One of the most prominent of these warrior reformers was Ma Ba, a Tukulor cleric and discipie of Al Haj Umar Tail’s who in 1861 launched a holy war and religious révolution against the pagan Mandinka chiefdoms and states along the Gambia River. Ma Ba’s religious wars pitted the party of the marabouts against the traditional rulers and ceάáo. By the mid-1860s, Ma Ba’s forces also controlled much of Saloum and Djolof and he had converted several prominent Wolof leaders to Islam, including Lat Dior of Cayor and Alboury N’Diaye of Djolof, who both played major roles in the Islamization of their home states and led the resistance against the French. Ma Ba died in 1867 during a decisive battle in which the pagan Serer state of Sine dealt a devastating defeat to his forces, temporarily halting the rapid advance of Islam in the region.

Meanwhile, the French were busy extending their control over the Senegal River from Saint Louis to Bakel and gaining a foothold over the mainland further south. In 1857, the French established a military post in the Lebu village of Dakar and gradually acquired control over the rest of the Cap Vert Peninsula. They then built several forts along the coast and sent troops and gunboats to the interior to protect French commerce and affirm France’s hegemony over the inland states. Resistance to the French conquest and occupation of African soil was widespread in Senegal. In many areas, particularly in the Wolof states, Islam became a catalyst for armed resistance. After the final defeat of the Wolof armies and the death of Lat Dior in 1886, the French were able to exercise direct control over most of Senegal with the exception of the Casamance, where the Diola and other ethnic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface to the Second Edition
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• 1 THE HISTORICAL BACKCROUND
• 2 GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
• 3 THE ECONOMY
• 4 SENEGAL AND THE WORLD
• 5 CULTURE AND SOCIETY
• 6 TOWARD THE YEAR 2000: WHITHER SENEGAL?
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index