West Africa; the fight for survival - a continent resists colonization

by M'Baye Gueye, Albert Adu Boahen

In March 1890, Archinard captured Segou and in his attempt to defeat Samori before ceding the Upper Senegal-Niger command to Humbert, attacked him in March 1891. Archinard thought that Samori's empire would collapse at the first onslaught. Though that attack resulted in the capturing of Kankan on 7 April and the burning of Bisandougou, its effect was quite the opposite since it not only provided Samori with a salutary warning but it enabled him also to continue the attacks on the French at Kankan and to defeat them at the battle of Dabadugu on 3 September 1891.

The major confrontation between the French and Samori, however, took place in 1892. Bent on defeating Samori, Humbert launched an attack on the central part of the Empire in January 1892 with 1,300 carefully picked riflemen and 3,000 porters. Samori took personal command of his carefully chosen army of 2,500 men to meet Humbert. Though these men, "fighting like demons, clung fiercely to every defensive point on the way", to quote historian Yves Person's words, they were defeated and Humbert succeeded in capturing Bisandougou, Sanankoro and Kerwane. Humbert himself admitted, however, that the results werre meagre in comparison to the heavy losses that he has sustained. Furthermore, Samori had ordered the civil population to withdraw at the approach of the French troops.

However, Samori had no illusions. After the violent encounters with the Humbert column in which he lost over a thousand men of his elite units as compared with only about a hundred lost by the French, he became convinced of the futility of cofronting the French. There were then two options open to him: either to surrender or to withdraw. He ruled out the former and decided to abandon his homeland and move to the east to create a new empire out of the reach of the Europeans.

Still continuing his scorched earth policy, he began his move eastward toward the Bandama and the Comoe rivers. Though in 1894 he lost the last route supplying him with modern weapons, which was the one to Monrovia, he nevertheless fought on. At the beginning of 1895, he encountered and beat back of a French column coming from the Baule country under the command of Monteil, and between July 1895 and January 1896 went on to conquer the Abron (Gyaman) kingdom and the western part of Gonja. By that time, he had succeeded in creating a new empire in the hinterland of the Ivory Coast and Asante.

In March 1897, his son Sarankenyi-Mori met and defeated a British column under the command of Henderson near Wa while Samori himself attacked and destroyed Kong in May 1897 and pushed on to Bobo where he encountered a French column under the command of Caudrelier.

Caught between the French and the British and having vainly attempted to sow discord between them by returning to the latter the territory of Bouna coveted by the former, Samori decided to return to his Toma allies in Liberia. On the way, he was captured in a surprise attack at Guelemou by Gouraud on 29 September 1898 and deported to Gabon where he died in 1900. His capture brought to an end what a recent scholar has described as "the longest series of campaigns against a single enemy in the history of French Sudanese conquest".