Samori Ture: Empire Builder and Champion of African Resistance

Introduction

Among the great figures who shaped the history of West Africa in the nineteenth century, Samori Ture stands apart as the most tenacious, the most resourceful, and ultimately the most tragic. Known variously as Samori Toure, Almami Samori, and in colonial French accounts as Samory, he was born around 1830 in the forested highlands of what is today the Republic of Guinea, and he died on June 2, 1900, a prisoner of France in the swampy lowlands of Gabon. Between those two dates he lived one of the most extraordinary lives in African history: a trader who became a soldier, a soldier who became a king, and a king who built an empire stretching across four modern nations only to watch it dismantled piece by piece by the most powerful military force then operating in West Africa.

Samori Ture founded the Wassoulou Empire, also known as the Mandinka Empire or the Empire of Samori, in the late 1870s, and for two decades he fought the French colonial advance with a combination of diplomatic skill, military innovation, and strategic genius that earned him the admiration of his enemies and the enduring reverence of the West African peoples he fought to protect. He defeated French forces in battle on multiple occasions, negotiated treaties he knew would be broken to buy time for his preparations, manufactured his own firearms when access to trade weapons was cut off, and executed one of the most astonishing strategic relocations in the history of pre-industrial warfare, moving his entire empire hundreds of miles eastward to create a new state in modern Cote d'Ivoire rather than submit to French rule.

He was captured only through treachery in September 1898, and he died in exile less than two years later. But the state he built, the resistance he organized, and the example he set lived on. Ahmed Sekou Toure, the first president of independent Guinea and one of the most influential Pan-African leaders of the twentieth century, was his great-grandson and drew explicitly on Samori's legacy in his political philosophy. Today Samori Ture is recognized as a national hero of Guinea and as one of the defining figures of African resistance to European colonialism.

Origins and Early Life

Samori Ture was born around 1830 in the village of Manyambaladugu, located southeast of the city of Kankan in the Guinea Highlands of what is today the Republic of Guinea. His family were Dyula people, sometimes spelled Dioula, who were part of the broad Mande-speaking Muslim trading network that had for centuries connected the forest zones of West Africa, rich in kola nuts and gold, with the savanna regions to the north, where these commodities were traded for salt, livestock, cloth, and other goods. The Dyula were not a single ethnic group but rather a diaspora of traders who shared a language, a religion, and a commercial culture that gave them mobility and connections across an enormous area.

Samori's father, Kemo Lanfia Ture, was a weaver and trader in the Ture clan, and the family was involved in the long-distance commerce that was the lifeblood of the Dyula world. When Samori was young, the family moved to Sanankoro, a village in the upper Milo River valley, which would remain the center of Samori's early career and eventually the site of his first major political and military base.