4.5.2. SENUFO FIGHT BACK

NAMBOLOSSE, GNAPON'S SON, RESISTS THE TRADERS

Djimini's hero "made the traders respect us. He forced them to speak our language. He pillaged caravans and said, 'If I renounce crime, how will I eat?' " 

 -- Serisio Coulibali, farmer

Gone from the web

 

He is killed in 1878, when "too old to fight."

-- Dakar archives, 1878

After his death Senufo continue their attacks. 

*    *

"Insecurity" is a leitmotif of European records, which assume that travelers (traders) of all kinds are attacked. They do not distinguish between those who are integrated into local society and those that menace it. In Djimini, that distinction is clear: 

• The Dyula petty traders, like the bead-selling merchant whose prayers helped found Bokhala, are so much part of Senufo society that their leaders are publicly drunk:

"Biraima Ouattara is not very firm on the Djimini throne. The newly-arrived marabouts bitterly reproach him for having become "Bambara" [pagan]. One must admit that the members of the royal family are all drunkards." 

-- Dakar archives

• The "newly arrived marabouts" have their own leadership, since "Royal power is held in check by the village chief Karamoko Bagui, backed by all the Muslims."

--Journal de Braulot, Paris archives, 1893*

.

*The notebook ended with the explorer writing in circles: He must have lost his mind. I learned that it had vanished from the archives, so this footnote must be all of that record that remains.

• The Darhala chief said he knew nothing about Karamoko Bagui and that the elders  did not either. That silence suggests that he opposed the Dyula and is a sign among others that the hostility between the two groups of Muslims remains.

Dyula did not use Islam to defy the traditional order and the Senufo did not attack them. They assaulted only caravans with donkeys, raised in the north.*

-- Dakar archives, 1891, confirmed by interlocutors 

 *Bites of the tsetse files in the nearby forest kill them.  

So:

• "We let the little Dyula be, but the Soninke were like fish. We did not know where they came from or where they were going, and we caught them like fish."  

-- Bafétigui Coulibali, imam of Dabakalakoro.

• "We:" The imam of Dabakalakoro (old Dabakala), which is Senufo and Dyula, identifies with animists against other Muslims.

*     *

For 15 years after Nambolossé's death long-distance traders and the raiders they back devastate territories to the east and west, but spare Djimini.

Senufo resistance works. 

*    *    *

Next,

4.5.3.

 Interpreting the story of Nambolossé