Samori Ture

Samori Touré was born around 1830 in the Konyan region of present-day Guinea, the son of a Dyula trader. By his fortieth year he had built, through conquest and federation, the Wassoulou Empire — a state stretching from the upper Niger to the headwaters of the Volta, encompassing what is now eastern Guinea, southern Mali, northern Côte d'Ivoire, and western Burkina Faso. He held it against France for sixteen years.

The Mandinka War, fought between Samori's army and French expeditionary forces from 1882 to 1898, was the longest sustained African resistance to nineteenth-century European colonial conquest south of Ethiopia. Samori's army was the only African military formation of the period to be wholly self-sufficient in firearms: he established arsenals at Bissandugu and Heremakono where Mandinka blacksmiths reverse-engineered French breech-loading rifles and produced approximately three to four hundred guns per month, ammunition included. His cavalry was organized in tactical units of two to three hundred men with rotating reserves.

He twice abandoned his capital and shifted his entire state — population, livestock, treasury — hundreds of miles east to deny the French the destruction he expected and to reconstitute around a new center. The maneuver, executed in 1891 and again in 1896, is studied in West African military history as the only successful strategic withdrawal of a pre-colonial state.

He was captured at Guélémou on the twenty-ninth of September 1898, deported to Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal and then to Gabon, where he died in exile on the second of June 1900. His great-grandson, Ahmed Sékou Touré, would become the first president of independent Guinea in 1958.

He is honored here as the founder of the Wassoulou Empire, the most determined of West Africa's anti-colonial resistors.