WARLORDS AND BIG-TIME TRADERS

RAIDERS AND POWERFUL MERCHANTS ALLY. 

Accounts of Nambolosse's death show not the literal truth, but the tie between the long-distance traders and slave raiders, and the lastingness of their memory.

• The real story: Nambolossé exacerbates traders' hostility when he demands that Bokhala Dyula yield up a Hausa arms and slave dealer, whom he wishes to make his slave. Some refuse, and leave Bokhala to found the burg of Dabakakoro ("old Dabakala"). Then he seizes the inheritance of a Soninke who has died on his lands, "though his heirs were known." Outraged by this unprecedented act, a Dyula chief attacks Bokhala when Nambolosse's warriors have left to intercept them by another route and burns him alive in his hut.

-- Dakar archives, 1878

• The Muslim version, by raiders' descendants: There is no mention of the Dyula chief. 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." 

• The animist version, by victims' descendants: Nambolosse does not die, but succeeds in chasing Mori out of Djimini. He would have caught him except that Mori has an excellent horse, which vanishes and reappears five kilometers farther away. On his flight from Djimini he meets Samori, and says, "Watch out for Djimini: There are real men there." Later Samori takes revenge for Mori's defeat: It is he who kills Nambolosse.

Reality: 

Nambolosse offends both groups of long-distance traders (from Senegal and Northern Nigeria) by demanding that a wealthy Hausa be given over to him as a slave and seizing a Soninke legacy. A Dyula chief (allied with them?) and his men come to Bokhala when the warriors are gone and, being "too old to fight," he is alone in his hut. They set fire to it and he is burned alive. 

-- Dakar archives, 1878

The dispossessed heirs call in Mori, whose men set fire to Nambolosse's hut. When he runs out they decapitate and eviscerate him, and cook his corpse on a spit, "like a roast."  

-- Bakari Coulibali, imam of Darhala

How the stories are told shows the lasting antagonism between the two groups, whose villages are separate.

• Burning Nambolosse "like a roast" reveals 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, and he didn't).

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

The animist version also shows Mori foreshadowing Samory (please continue). He is one raider among many: After about 1870, at least four others terrify populations of the northern Ivory Coast: "Mori" and Vakuba Ture who "raids in the east with his sons."

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

# # #

Except for the sentence above, I found no mention in the Paris or Abidjan archives of raiders whom the French did not confront.

Records in general 

leave out what the narrators think

does not concern them.

End of this section.

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Next section,

V.5.

Commercial forces win, then crumble