Sarraounia Mangou

Sarraounia — the Hausa title meaning "queen" — was the sovereign of the Azna people in the village of Lougou in what is now Niger. She came to the throne in the late nineteenth century, in the Aïr Mountains region that the trans-Saharan trade routes had made one of the wealthiest pre-colonial states in the central Sudan.

In 1899 the French Voulet-Chanoine Mission — a punitive military expedition under Captains Paul Voulet and Julien Chanoine, organized to consolidate French control over the central Sudan — entered her territory. The Mission had become notorious across French West Africa for atrocities: villages burned, populations massacred, women and children executed for failure to provide tribute. By the time they reached Lougou the column had killed approximately ten thousand people across the central Sudan in a year of operations.

Sarraounia refused to surrender her village. She mobilized her army, employed defensive earthworks and traditional Azna religious resources, and met the French column at the Battle of Lougou on the sixteenth of April 1899. She defeated them. The Voulet-Chanoine column — the most heavily armed and supplied French expedition in West Africa to that date — was forced to retreat, having failed to take the village.

The battle was the only African military victory over the Voulet-Chanoine Mission. Captains Voulet and Chanoine were subsequently killed by their own French troops in a mutiny in July 1899, in part because the Lougou defeat had broken their authority.

Sarraounia's date of death is uncertain — most likely shortly after the battle, of wounds sustained or in subsequent French reprisal. She was approximately fifty.

The 1986 Mauritanian film Sarraounia by Med Hondo, drawing on her oral tradition, restored her memory to West African public consciousness.

She is honored here as the queen who defeated the cruelest French column of the colonial period.