Muslims were enslaved, nonetheless, and individuals whose freeborn status might be questioned might find themselves enslaved. This was the case of the Hausa slave who became known as Pierre Tamata, who was purchased at Porto Novo or Ouidah by a French merchant sometime in the 1770s or perhaps earlier and taken to France, where he was educated. Tamata then returned to West Africa as an agent for French merchants from La Rochelle and subsequently became the principal merchant at Porto Novo in the 1780s.62 Whether he was a freeborn Muslim or not, Tamata was a willing collaborator in the slave trade to the French Caribbean and profited from his involvement. Nonetheless, he continued to identify as Muslim, and his son became the imam of the Muslim community in Porto Novo. His descendants still reside in Porto Novo, where a handsome mosque stands as testimony to his historic importance. Very few enslaved Muslims were sent from Porto Novo to the French Caribbean while Tamata was involved in the trade. It is not clear whether Tamata was responsible for assuring this commercial pattern, but at the same time, Muslims and many others whose allegiance to Islam might have been questionable did leave Porto Novo and other ports in the Bight of Benin, principally for Bahia. Enslaved Muslims were living in Porto Novo in the 1780s and 1790s and apparently in Dahomey as well, where they were also frequently engaged in crafts and in the military.63
People who were identified as Hausa constituted a significant community in Bahia by the first decade of the nineteenth century, which confirms the criticisms of the jihād leadership in the interior that questionable sales of slaves to Europeans were taking place. The complaint was a fundamental objection of Muslims.64 The extent to which slaves were Muslim at the outbreak of the jihād is difficult to establish, although information from Oyo and the Guinea coast, as well as the presence of enslaved Muslims, usually described as “Hausa,” “Tapa” (i.e., Nupe), and “Borno” in the Americas, demonstrates that enslaved Muslims were traded south, apparently increasingly so after the 1750s and certainly by the 1780s, when Oyo opened a direct route to the Bight of Benin and established its hegemony over Porto Novo and Badagry as a means of bypassing the route through Dahomey to Ouidah. Trade developed rapidly after 1770, when merchants began to buy slaves at Porto Novo, Badagry, and Lagos as well, and then there were discussions of establishing a French fort at Porto Novo. It was never built, but nonetheless the proposal demonstrates French interest in the area.65 According to Peter Morton-Williams, Oyo developed the route to Porto Novo by settling slaves in the largely deserted Egbado districts, thereby creating a safe outlet to the coast that bypassed Dahomey, which paid tribute to Oyo but limited Oyo profits from the sale of slaves.66 As the foremost merchant in Porto Novo, Pierre Tamata was instrumental in promoting Oyo commercial operations in supplying slaves for St. Domingue and other French islands in the Caribbean.67 In the 1780s and early 1790s Tamata took advantage of his Hausa origin and his education in France to turn his business into a profitable enterprise, his former master “granting him credit to a considerable amount.”68 Muslim merchants took their slave caravans south from the central Bilād al-Sūdān, crossing the Niger at Raka, which was located a few kilometers from the Niger River, near its confluence with the Moshi, and then went to Porto Novo, where Tamata served as their contact.
Many of the slaves who originally came from the central Bilād al-Sūdān were retained in Oyo, in Dahomey, or on the coast itself. By the end of the eighteenth century there was a large Yoruba population in Raka, even though the town was originally Nupe. According to Samuel Johnson, “Nearly all the children of influential Oyo chiefs resided there permanently for the purpose of trade.”69 By the early nineteenth century enslaved Muslims had become a recognized and significant element in the Oyo military, especially the cavalry stationed at Ilorin, and in certain crafts in the Oyo capital.70 Even as late as 1804, after the demise of the French trade, Porto Novo remained a principal source of slaves coming from Oyo; in a letter from King Hufon to Prince João of Portugal, 16 November 1804, Porto Novo was described as “the port where there is the greatest abundance of captives; the Ayos [Oyo] and Malês [i.e., Muslims] bring them here,” clearly along the route from Raka through Oyo.71 In 1812 Muhammad Bello described this trade in his geographical description of the central Bilād al-Sūdān. “Yarba,” by which he meant Oyo, was an
extensive province, containing rivers, forests, sands, and mountains, as also a great many wonderful and extraordinary things. . . . By the side of this province there is an anchorage or harbour for the ships of the Christians, who used to go there and purchase slaves. These slaves were exported from our country, and sold to the people of Yarba [Yoruba], who resold them to the Christians.72
Bello’s comments are instructive. They reveal that the learned Muslim leadership was aware that merchants who inevitably would have been Muslims, since all trade passed through a commercial network that was Muslim, were involved in the sale of slaves to Oyo and hence to Christian merchants on the coast. As reports from the early nineteenth century make clear, merchants traveled overland to Porto Novo from the “country of the Joos [Oyo],” which was “the principal negro nation,” passing through the country of the “Anagoos [Anago] and Mahees [Mahi]” but avoiding Dahomey, along “rivers, morasses, and large lakes which intersect the countries between Haoussa and the coast,” apparently referring to the lagoons between Porto Novo and Lagos.73 Indeed, before 1807 Hausa traders “were continually to be met with at Lagos.”74 This was the trade with the Christians that Muslim reformers wanted to stop and that was one of the causes of the jihād in the central Bilād al-Sūdān.
In his discussion of “important matters” in Masāʾil muhimma (1217/1802), ʿUthmān dan Fodio, also referred to as shaykh, wrote that the sale of any “Fulani” as a slave was strictly forbidden. Writing at Degel, which the Muslims had established in the face of political persecution, the shaykh based his ruling on the long-standing recognition that most Fulbe were Muslims. By this time tension between the followers of dan Fodio and the government of Gobir had reached an impasse. In a poem written in Fulfulde, Tabbat hakika, dan Fodio predicted that “one who enslaves a freeman, he shall suffer torment. The Fire shall enslave him, be sure of that!”75 In another song he attributed the “troubles” of the central Bilād al-Sūdān to the disregard of freeborn status, condemning any actions that led to the “capture of a free man, not a slave; then follow this with enslavement.” His definition of who was a “free man” referred to Muslims.76 In response to the questions of al-Ḥājj Shisummas ibn Aḥmad, a Tuareg cleric, the shaykh reiterated the criteria for the enslavement of captives, specifically addressing the concerns of freeborn people who had been enslaved and therefore morally and legally could not be enslaved, although their ransom could be demanded and proof of their status required.77 Similarly, Muhammad Bello in Miftaḥ al-sadād also insisted that it was “not lawful to enslave the Fulani,” despite the fact that in the Bilād al-Sūdān there were some Fulani living between Katsina and Kano and to the west of Katsina whom Bello did not consider Muslims.78 Such frequent pronouncements appear to reflect a situation in which the Muslim leadership thought that there was a serious problem with regard to slavery, not specifically with respect to slavery as an institution but with efforts to distinguish who could be enslaved and who should not be enslaved and what had to be done to regulate enslavement.
The various testimonies of ‘Uthmān dan Fodio, Muhammad Bello, and others apparently attest to the conditions of wide areas of West Africa. These complaints seem to have been common wherever Fulbe herded their cattle and Muslims like the Sulleibawa settled and began to teach. The inspiration of the Fuuta jihāds in Senegambia and the perceived transformation of political society in those states prompted the spread of resistance and criticism. As the level of education of many leaders demonstrates, there was a preoccupation with learning, political reform, and the demand for rights as Muslims. Protection from enslavement was considered the right of freeborn Muslims and recognition of the integrity of anyone who claimed that status. Slavery and the slave trade were factors in the jihād movement, as was autonomy from the European-dominated Atlantic world.
The first phase of the jihād movement that was concentrated in Senegambia had