An example of the interlocking commercial and religious connections across West Africa can be gleaned from the biography of Abū Bakr al-Siddīq, who was born in Timbuktu around 1790 and was brought up in Jenne, farther south on the Niger River. Abū Bakr’s life story is known from his autobiography and other documents that came to light in Jamaica, where he became associated with R. R. Madden, special magistrate at the time of the British emancipation of slaves in 1834.42 Abū Bakr’s father, Kara Mūsā, who traced his ancestry to Shaykh ‘Abd al-Qādir, was of shurfa descent, that is, someone who claimed to be a descendant of the Prophet, which in turn traces his origin to Morocco. The family had been prominent among the Muslim learned class in West Africa for generations. Kara Mūsā was considered tafsīr (a West African grammatical corruption of mufassir, a scholar who specialized in Qu’ranic exegesis) and was a prominent merchant. Abū Bakr received his early education in Jenne and at age nine began an extended tour of Muslim centers in West Africa, first at the Juula town of Kong and then at Bouna, where, according to Ivor Wilks, ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Ḥajj Muhammad al-Watarawi presided over a community of scholars drawn from many parts of the western Bilād al-Sūdān. Indeed, Abū Bakr’s teachers included not only al-Watarawi but also Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir Sankari from Fuuta Jalon, Ibrāhīm ibn Yūsuf from Fuuta Toro, and Ibrāhīm ibn Abī al-Ḥasan of Silla, who was originally from Dyara, an important Soninke center near Nioro, north of modern Bamako. Moreover, Abū Bakr’s mother, Ḥafsah, who was known as Nagode (Hausa: “I am thankful”), was from Katsina but also had family in Borno. Her father, Muhammad Tafsīr, had been on pilgrimage to Mecca, and he and her brothers were involved in trade with Borno and the middle Volta basin and Asante. Abū Bakr’s trade with his father-in-law, Muhammad Tafsīr, included gold, as well as horses, donkeys, mules, and silks that had been imported from Egypt, and although Abū Bakr does not mention them, kola nuts were almost certainly sent to Katsina as well. Thus Abū Bakr was associated with the intellectual and commercial diaspora that stretched from Senegambia to Lake Chad in the eighteenth century.43
As Abū Bakr’s account demonstrates, the interior trade of the western and central Bilād al-Sūdān constituted a diversified regional commerce that was to a large extent ecologically determined, and goods imported via the Atlantic and the Sahara supplemented this regional trade of West Africa.44 The variety of goods that were traded reflected a pattern of commerce that was closely associated with ecological regions and localized niches of production. Commodities included agricultural products, livestock, minerals, and manufactured goods. Many towns and cities of the interior grew with the development of extensive regional markets. Trade across ecological zones from the desert through the Sahel and the savanna to the forested regions of the coast fostered economic exchange. For example, livestock and salt were produced in the desert and the Sahel, whereas agricultural products, such as grain, root and tree crops, cotton, and indigo, were prominent in the region, depending on local conditions. Moreover, such manufactured goods as cotton textiles and leather products were centered in the many towns and cities in the agricultural zones. In addition to kola nuts, various types of salt were also widely distributed that were used not only for culinary purposes but for various medicinal purposes for both people and animals and for industrial needs in textile dyeing, the tanning of leather, and soap production. Some salts were also mixed with tobacco for use as snuff or for chewing, stashed already prepared for ingestion in leather pouches. Kola nuts and gold were key commodities from the forested regions inland from the Sierra Leone River, the region south of Wagadugu, and the Akan forests.45
The Muslim commercial networks across West Africa comprised socially determined communities based on common origins. Merchants of these commercial networks were recognized as Hausa, Maraka, Yarse, Jakhanke, or Wangara or employed self-identifying names, such as Saghanughu, Kabā, and Ture, that associated individuals with particular towns and regions of origin.46 Curtin actually studied one of these networks, the Jakhanke, on the basis of which he first developed the concept of commercial diaspora. His work was reinforced by the excellent study of the Jakhanke by Lamin Sanneh.47 The recognition of Islam as the religion of community, the use of common commercial languages, either Hausa or Manding and its dialects, such as Juula, and the maintenance of social relationships and kinship over great distances formed the basis of layered and overlapping commercial diasporas that facilitated the operation of trading networks. The communities of the diaspora provided the infrastructure for the commercial networks and for the religious, marital, kin, and intellectual networks that constituted the diaspora and tied it to the homeland or a central town or city. Although the focus here is on the commercial and legal dimensions of the Muslim diasporas in West Africa, it should be recognized that these diasporas not only serviced trading networks but also, like other commercial diasporas, accommodated other kinds of networks that were religious, kinship based, educational, marital, and commercial. Diasporas operated across space over long distances and were based on communities that served as outposts for commercial and culturally specific interactions. The population associated with diasporas was used to traveling, often involving marriage to partners in towns along the trade routes. The constituents of commercial diasporas were instructed to travel for business, for an education, or to visit relatives and to engage in apprenticeship in trade and craft production. Mobility in the operation of long-distance trade was reinforced as a way of life through parallel migrations for other reasons.
The centrality of learning and hence basic education was a feature of the jihād movement. It was through teaching and the dissemination of historic texts that Islam was consolidated as the dominant religion in the interior of West Africa. The centrality of literacy was not new but had characterized the religious and political elite for generations and had predominated during the era of the Songhay Empire. By the end of the eighteenth century the importance of literacy lay in the means of focusing on the cause and course of jihād. The literary flowering of the jihād movement can be likened to the European Enlightenment’s role in inspiring and directing the age of revolutions. In this sense the age of jihād finds a parallel with revolution elsewhere and was indeed linked with Muslims throughout West Africa, in the Maghreb, and elsewhere in the Islamic world.
Lamine Kabā, who was born in Fuuta Jalon about 1780 and arrived in the United States around 1807, provided a detailed account of education in the jihād states. According to his biographer, Theodore Dwight Jr.,
Lamen Kebe . . . was born in the kingdom of Futa Jalloo [Fuuta Jalon], and travelled sufficiently during his youth to give much interest to the accounts he communicates. He performed two journeys, when quite young, to the Jaliba or Niger River, in one instance in company with an army of Mahomedans, in a successful war upon an idolatrous nation, to convert them to Islamism. His education, which commenced at fourteen, and was finished at twenty-one, was obtained chiefly at Bunder, the city in which a late and expensive English expedition of discovery met a fatal defeat from the natives. He was a school-master five years in the city of Kebe [Kangaba], which he left to travel to the coast, to obtain paper for the use of his pupils, when he was taken and sold as a slave.48
His father was “Serecule,” that is, Sarakole; his mother was of the “Manenca” nation. He had originally lived north of Fuuta Jalon at Diafun or Jafunu and subsequently at Jaga (Diaga), but a plague of locusts