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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/23743
Description
Title
Fanga: The Bamana in the middle Niger, 1830-1910
Author(s)
Djata, Sundiata
Issue Date
1994
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Stewart, Charles C.
Department of Study
History, Black
History, African
Discipline
History, Black
History, African
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
History, Black
History, African
Language
eng
Abstract
This study is about the history of the people identified as the Bamana. There are three major focal points of this study which are important to the historiography of West Africa and of political hegemony. First, this history is approached from the Bamana point of view. In addition, the Bamana Fanga is an example of ways in which state unity was found by ideologies other than religion. Moreover, this is a comparison between African and European occupations. These political activities take place in the Middle Niger Valley.
The Middle Niger region in the West African Sudanic belt has a long history as a buffer between the Mediterranean world and West Africa. The trade system that developed along the Niger River connected a vast West African commerce to the major entrepots of the Maghrib as well as to the West African coast to the South, and had long been integrated into both Mediterranean and South Atlantic maritime economies.
The Bamana state of Segu emerged in 1712 as an heritor of the political and economic power centered on the Middle Niger which ended when the Moroccans invaded the Songhai Empire in 1591. Exploiting this strategic agricultural and commercial location between the Niger and Bani Rivers, the Bamana extended their sphere of influence from Timbuktu in the North to Odienne in the South, and from Bure Guinea in the West to the frontiers of present-day Burkina Faso in the East.
The Bamana Fanga was itself conquered by two foreign powers in a thirty year period; the first was African, led by al-Hajj 'Umar (1861) in the name of religious reform, and the second was European (1890) for the cause of French imperial expansion. The objectives of the two conquests were similar: to dominate the rich agricultural lands and commercial routes in the Middle Niger. This is a story of those two conquests and efforts by two alien powers to assert hegemony over the Bamana. The Bamana Fanga offers an excellent opportunity for this type of study because of the proximity in time of the two foreign occupations.
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