4.3.3. AN UPHEAVAL, KOLA AND ROUTES TO THE FOREST EDGE

TRADERS FROM SEEK DIRECT ACCESS TO KOLAS

They make the color for dyes. Chewed, they lessen thirst and fatigue and bring a light euphoria. 

Zoom

• Songhay falls (in 1591). Paths open. Merchants establish colonies along them, whose chiefs forbid going farther. One of those centers is Kong:

Adapted from a Google map

• Toward 1700, a "mad" ruler (Lasari Gombele), shoots into the market and seizes the wares people leave behind as they flee. A kola trader from the Niger (Mallam Boro), and a local merchant (Seku Wattara) unite to overthrow him.*

*Information given by Karamoko Wattara, the canton chief, and Bassidi Watara, farmer, May 4 and 6 1973. 

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Like the conflict that the Misakullah story announces, an oral tradition reveals conflict between bypassed interests and new ones: 

• The names show that the struggle is between the animist king who controls the economy and merchants, who are Muslims by definition. Some locals support them, presumably people who produce and sell supplies. 

• Events are typical: Authorities use violence against rising interests, fighting erupts, the new men win. The barrier to profit that they contest, here the king's monopoly of routes to the south, vanishes. Commerce expands. A new cycle begins.

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Routes to the south open. Kong becomes a center for commerce and Islam. 

Du Niger au Golfe de Guinée par le pays de Kong et le Mossi (1887-89) by captain Louis Gustave Binger, 1892 / zoom

"View of Kong, capital of the Empire of Kong"

Captain Binger

A Kong mosque

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Traders set up outposts on the forest's fringe, toward 1740.*

*A report in the Abidjan archives dates the foundation of the Grumania settlement toward 1740, and Djimini oral tradition places another, Satala-Sokura, at about the same time. (Aubin, p. 432).

They arrive in Djimini. 

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Next,
4.3.4.

Classless communities that elders lead