Mungo Park and the Niger

by Joseph Thomson

That race was the Fulah, and their bond of union was the religion of Islam.

Where they came from is unknown. Everything relating to them is a matter of conjecture, though in the Sudanese chronicles we find various allusions to them extending back several centuries.

Their well-chiselled features, straight wiry hair, and copper-coloured skin, all distinctly mark them off as not African, and point towards the East as the cradle of their race. Still more, their well-developed skulls and high intellectual average place them on an altogether higher level in the scale of humanity than any of the negro or Bantu races among whom they settled.

At some remote period, we may safely conjecture, they immigrated from the East, and gradually moved westward—not as warrior-conquerors, but as peace-loving shepherds, whose knowledge of cattle, &c., made them welcome additions to every country they reached. Nomadic in habit, and depending for subsistence on their flocks and herds, it was impossible for them to settle in large numbers in any one place—the country being already occupied by the negro inhabitants. Accordingly it was ever necessary for them to move westward, leaving behind them only such numbers as could conveniently get a living.

By the fourteenth or fifteenth century the Fulahs had reached the watersheds of the Niger and the Gambia. Here the migratory tide was stopped by physical and other causes. The country beyond proved to be less adapted for pastoral pursuits, and possibly was already thickly populated.

There being no further outlet westward, the newcomers naturally accumulated as does the dammed back stream. They increased in numbers, and correspondingly in power, till they became of no small importance, and founded for themselves a kingdom which has been already mentioned under the name of Fulahdu.

When Islam crossed the desert and found its way in the ninth and tenth centuries into the Sudan, the Fulahs were the very first to become converts to the new religion. Their temperament, their higher intellectual development, made them more quickly susceptible to the new influences, and hence it was that while as yet the great mass of the aborigines were still infidel, the Fulahs with one voice were proclaiming their belief in Allah and His Prophet. Persecution, as in the case of other religions, had only the result of burning the tenets of Islam deeper into their souls, causing their faith to shine with a clearer and more spiritual light to the edification and instruction of the surrounding idolaters. In the Western Sudan, where they enjoyed, or came to enjoy, an independent existence, Islam spread among the Fulahs with special rapidity; and with the fall of Songhay and the crippling of the influence of Timbuktu, they became the chief propagators of Mohammedanism and the great encouragers of learning by means of mosques and schools—rarely by the power of fire and the sword. Not only did they and their co-religionists of neighbouring tribes, the Mandingoes and the Jolofs, thus spread a knowledge of the One God—they at the same time did an equally noble work in arraying themselves against the rapidly advancing flood of gin which Christian Europe was pouring into their country. With that traffic they would have nothing to do, and unlike so many of our Christian merchants, no consideration of profit would tempt them to a compromise between their conscience and the lust for gain.

Meanwhile the Fulahs of the kingdoms of the interior had much to do to hold their own among their Pagan masters. Their position was most galling to a race which knew themselves infinitely superior to those whom they were obliged to own as masters—more bitter still that they, the inheritors of the promises, should be ruled by idolaters and men whose portion was Gehenna. Broken up as they were into little groups scattered over an enormous area, what could they do? The answer to that question was speedily forthcoming. They had, as we have shown, the necessary bond of union and the inspiring spiritual force to make them fight as one man for a common end. They only needed the leader to utilise this force and bring it into action. Such a man is never wanting when the times demand him, and he in this case was forthcoming in the person of Othman, the Imam or religious sheik of the Fulah of Gober, the northern of the Haussa States.

Under the influence of this sheik the Fulah of that region were roused to a state of religious fervour such as they had never known before. His fiery eloquence touched their excitable and imaginative nature as he brought home to them the shame of their semi-enslaved position. The fires of discontent were thus set smouldering, and required but a little more fanning to cause them to blaze into the flames of rebellion.