4.5.3. THE MULTIPLE DEATHS OF NAMBOLOSSÉ

MEMORIES SHOW HOW CONFLICTS ENDURE  

The French record gives what must be the real facts, since the writer has no interest at stake.

• When Nambolossé demands that a Hausa dealer in arms and slaves be yielded up to him, a number of  traders leave Bokhala to found Dabakalakoro ("old Dabakala").* 

* In Old Regime France departure without the permission of the king signaled revolt or when that became impossible, exclusion from help from him. One assumes that the merchants departure, particularly to found a new center, was a very serious affront. 

• Then he seizes the inheritance of a Soninke who has died on his lands, "though his heirs were known." Outraged, a Dyula* chief and his men attack Bokhala when Nambolosse's warriors have left to intercept them by another route. They burn him alive in his hut.

-- Dakar archives, 1878

* The French administrator may not distinguish between Dyula petty merchants and the much more assertive Soninke and Maraba. Local memories say nothing of Dyula in the fight that follows and one of my interlocutors, a Dyula imam, sided with the Senufo.

The Darhala version

Defendants of the disinherited Soninke call in "Mori," the Hausa chief of Marabadiassa, who in the 1870's and 1880's raids in the west. He arrives in Bokhala when Nambolossé's men are gone. They set fire to his hut and when he leaves it, slaughter him and burn his corpse on a prong, "like a roast." 

-- Bakari Coulibali, imam of Darhala

The Senufo version

Nambolossé does not die, but chases Mori out of Djimini. He would have caught him except that Mori has an excellent horse, which vanishes and reappears five kilometers away. On his flight from Djimini he meets Samory (the legendary conqueror the next section describes) and says, "Watch out for Djimini. There are real men there." Later Samory takes revenge for Mori's defeat: It is he who kills Nambolossé.

*     *

Versions by descendants of the long-distance and petty merchants reveal lasting antagonism, 

• Burning Nambolosse "like a roast" indicates Muslim contempt for animists, which my teen-aged interpreter expressed by yelling insults at them from the window of a car. (I told him I'd fire him if he did it again. He didn't.)

• "Watch out for Djimini: There are real men there" expresses animist resistance to the Muslims and pride.

*     *

Mori and Samory are only two of a number of raiders who devastated this part of the savannah. Samory is famous for his resistance to the French (more below) but for others, the longest passage I have seen is "Vakuba Ture, who raids in the east with his sons."

-- Abidjan archives for the Bondoukou region (east of Djimini) 

    Arab slavers in East Africa, publication of 1892 / zoom

Muslims often wore long white robes and slave raiders everywhere must have looked like these.  

*    *

Accounts often leave out

what they think does not concern them. 

End of this section.

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Next section,

4.6.

Producers win, then crumble

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